Three Strikes

 ,     . .  

“Our young have heard of celebrated battles: Valley Forge, Gettysburg,

Normandy; but they have been denied the history of labor’s battles
against overwhelming odds for basic human rights. Three of those
strikes, tragic and hopeful, are stunningly recounted in this revelatory
book. It is must reading, especially for the young.” —          
“Three Strikes brings to life the heroic men and women who put their jobs,
bodies, and lives on the line to win a better life for all working Americans.
Zinn, Frank, and Kelley show us that while the country and the union
movement have changed greatly in the last hundred years, our struggle to
close the divide between rich and poor remains the same.”
—        
“Zinn, Frank, and Kelley give us a fresh account of three of the great la-
bor battles of American history. These are gripping stories, vivid narra-
tives of spirited and sometimes amazing struggles, and they are told here
with grace and insight. More than that, the stories are important because
they illuminate the ongoing and future battles of American workers.”
—            

hree renowned historians recre-
T ate the world of working Ameri-
cans in the early twentieth century.
Howard Zinn recounts the tale of
the great coal mine strike in Col-
orado that culminated in the Ludlow
Massacre. The story pits immigrant
workers against the National Guard,
Mother Jones against the Rocke-
fellers, and corporate power against
union organizing, a story that is all
too familiar today.
With Dana Frank we join a sit-in
strike in a Detroit Woolworth’s during
the Great Depression where young
women slept on the floor, sang
songs together, and enjoyed the at-
tention of an amused and curious
public that vilified the “chain-store
threat” long before Wal-Mart.
Robin D. G. Kelley’s tale of a
movie theater musician’s strike in
New York gets at the heart of what
defines a worker. Facing the inevi-
table dominance of sound movies,
the musicians failed even to agree on
demands, and could not prevent
members of other unions from
crossing their picket lines. What hap-
pens when jobs are lost to new tech-
nologies, and how can labor help?
Howard Zinn is a teacher, historian,
and activist, and the author of many
books, including A People’s History
of the United States and You Can’t Be
Neutral on a Moving Train. Dana
Frank, professor of American studies
at the University of California, Santa
Cruz, is author of Buy American.
Robin D. G. Kelley, professor of his-
tory at New York University, is the au-
thor of Freedom Dreams and Yo’
Mama’s Disfunktional!
This page intentionally left blank
 THREE
STRIKES
Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the
Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century

HOWARD ZINN
~~~~
DANA FR ANK
~~~~
ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

beacon press
boston
Beacon Press
25 Beacon Street
Boston, Massachusetts 02108-2892
www.beacon.org

Beacon Press books

are published under the auspices of
the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.

© 2001 by Howard Zinn, Dana Frank, Robin D. G. Kelley

All rights reserved

First electronic reading edition 2002

Composition by Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Zinn, Howard.
Three strikes : the fighting spirit of labor's last century / Howard Zinn, Dana Frank, Robin D.
G. Kelley.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-8070-5014-8
ISBN 0-8070-5012-1 (cloth)
1. Strikes and lockouts—United States—Case studies. 2. Labor movement—United
States—History—20th century. I. Frank, Dana. II. Kelley, Robin D. G. III. Title.
HD5324.Z56 2001
331.892´973´09041—dc21
2001001135
i n memory of
Debra Bernhardt
 Contents

Introduction 1

The Colorado Coal Strike, 1913–14

h owar d z in n
5

Girl Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big:

The Detroit Woolworth’s Strike of 1937
d ana f ra nk
57

Without a Song:
New York Musicians Strike Out against Technology
r ob in d. g. ke ll ey
119

Bibliography 157
Acknowledgments 171
This page intentionally left blank
 Introduction

Three Strikes is a critical tribute to labor’s past and its most recent
resurrection. In an age when production has become less pivotal to
working-class life as capital flees the country in search of cheaper
labor, relatively lower taxes, and a deregulated, frequently anti-
union environment, the renewed labor movement has taken root in
America’s latest service-based economy. These ‘‘new workers’’ are
concentrated in the healthcare professions, educational institu-
tions, office building maintenance, telemarketing, food processing,
food services and various retail establishments, and the prison-
industrial complex. Among them we find more and more black and
brown faces, increasingly more women than men (at least among
the rank and file), and far too many folks cobbling together incomes
from part-time work.
Faced with the challenges of ‘‘globalization,’’ an increasingly di-
verse and mobile working class, and the shifting gender makeup of
the nation’s workforce, the most progressive labor leaders have ex-
tended their efforts beyond the workplace and beyond the bound-
aries of the nation-state. They reach out to the very communities
where working people live, dream, and die, and in the process the
union movement has been re-infused with the fighting spirit that
working-class neighborhoods have nurtured for so long. The most
visionary labor organizers are attempting to build a movement
without borders, recognizing that any significant challenge to
global capital depends on international solidarity.
Our tribute, as we have said, is a ‘‘critical’’ one. This book looks

[1]
 Introduction
backward to look forward. It attempts to capture the fighting spirit
of labor’s last century, to see if there are any lessons for the struggles
yet to come. But we are not interested in merely celebrating labor’s
heroic traditions of advocacy and resistance to exploitation. As each
of the following strikes demonstrates, the struggles of American
working people were far more complex, far more diverse, and far
more interesting than common lore would have us believe.
There is a shameful failure in the history courses and texts of the
American educational system to tell the truth about this dimension
of the nation’s history. The result is to deprive us all of the inspiring
stories of diverse working people who fought against great odds—
the combined power of business and government—to try to bring
a measure of dignity to their lives. The strike Howard Zinn writes
about for this book, the Colorado Coal Strike of 1913–14, is one of
the most dramatic and violent examples of class conflict in Ameri-
can history. To bring it back into public view is to educate us all
about an economic system which in its most essential character—
the control of the lives of working people by powerful, invisible
forces—has barely changed.
Today we are nearly overcome with the enormity of corporate
power, now operating on a global stage. Yet young people, espe-
cially, are looking for new ways to challenge it. The story of the 1937
Woolworth’s sit-down strike, told here by Dana Frank, resonates
with the creative ideas and transnational targets of activists in the
streets today. Woolworth’s in the 1930s was the equivalent of Wal-
Mart, the Gap, and K-Mart; it was also the subject of an enormous
social movement against what people called ‘‘the chain store evil.’’
In March of 1937, 108 very young white women (most of them were
in their teens) suddenly occupied the largest Woolworth’s in De-
troit, Michigan, to demand a living wage and decent working condi-
tions. Their raucous fun inside the store and the spectacular na-
tional solidarity outside are part of an uplifting tale of young
people’s visionary energy and, best of all, young women subverting

[2]
 Introduction
the reigning stereotypes of the day about their relative interests in
‘‘boys,’’ beautification, and economic betterment.
Our third strike story, told here by Robin Kelley, is about people
who rarely thought of themselves as workers, a union waging an
impossible war against technological displacement, the trials and
tribulations of artists when the work of art, in this case music, is
mass-produced, and the rapid transformation of the urban leisure
industry and its impact on both cultural workers and working-class
consumers. It is also about the limits of solidarity: What happens
when the very technology used to destroy one segment of the work-
force also generates new desires and pleasures for working people
as a whole?
The questions raised by these stories are as timely in 2001 as
they were in decades long past. The answers will invariably be dif-
ferent, but the great thing about history is that it stimulates our
imaginations and casts light on our contemporary dilemmas as we
discover how real people have dealt with similar circumstances.
Their successes and failures, victories and missteps give us some-
thing to think about and to build upon.

Robin D. G. Kelley, Dana Frank, Howard Zinn

January 24, 2001

[3]
This page intentionally left blank
 HOWARD ZINN
~~~~~
The Colorado Coal Strike,
1913–14
This page intentionally left blank
on april 21, 1914, in the quiet afternoon, a telephone linesman
was making his way through the charred ruins of a miners’ tent col-
ony in southern Colorado. He lifted an iron cot covering a pit under
one of the tents, and there he found the blackened, swollen bodies
of eleven children and two women. The news was flashed swiftly to
the world. The tragedy was given a name: the Ludlow Massacre.
Some Americans know about the Ludlow Massacre, though it
does not appear in most of the history texts used in our schools and
colleges. Woody Guthrie wrote a song about it, a dark, brooding
song. But few know that the Ludlow Massacre was the central event
in a fourteen-month strike of coal miners that took a toll of at least
sixty-six lives—a strike which is one of the most dramatic and vio-
lent events in the history of this country.
Two governmental committees subsequently recorded over five
thousand pages of firsthand testimony by participants in the Colo-
rado coal strike. Thousands of newspaper stories and hundreds of
magazine articles dealt with the conflict. Some of the most fas-
cinating figures in American history were involved in some way
in that event: Mother Jones and Eugene Debs, Woodrow Wilson,
John D. Rockefeller and Ivy Lee, Upton Sinclair and John Reed.

[7]
 Howard Zinn
Yet that story has been buried, in the way that labor struggles in
general have been omitted or given brief mention in most main-
stream accounts of the history of the United States. It deserves to
be recalled, because embedded in the events of the Colorado strike
are issues still alive today: the class struggle between owners of
large enterprises and their workers, the special treatment of immi-
grant workers, the relationship between economic power and polit-
ical power, the role of the press, and the way in which the culture
censors out certain historical events.

The Colorado strike took place in a physical setting of vast propor-

tions and staggering beauty. Down the center of the rectangle that
is Colorado, from north to south, march an array of huge, breathtak-
ing mountains—the Rockies—whose naked cliffs merge, on their
eastern edge, with low hills covered with cedar and yellow pine. To
the east of that is the plain—really a mile-high plateau—a tawny
expanse of pasture grass sprinkled with prairie flowers in the spring
and summer, and gleaming here and there with yellow-blossomed
cactus.
Beneath the tremendous weight of the Rockies, in the course of
countless centuries, decaying vegetation gradually mineralized
into the black rock known as coal. The constantly increasing propor-
tion of carbon in this rock transformed it from vegetable matter to
peat, then to lignite and bituminous coal, and finally to anthracite.
Three great coalfields, consisting chiefly of bituminous coal,
were formed in Colorado. One of them was contained within two
counties in southern Colorado, Las Animas and Huerfano coun-
ties, just east of the mountains. This field was made up of about
forty discontinuous seams, ranging from a few inches to fourteen
feet thick. These seams were from two hundred and fifty to about
five hundred feet deep.
The mining of these fields became possible on a large scale only
in the 1870s, when the railroads moving west from Kansas City,
south from Denver, and north from New Mexico, converged on the

[8]
 The Colorado Coal Strike, 1913–14
region. At about this time, settlers moving down the old Santa Fe
trail built a town on the banks of the Purgatory River (el Rio de las
Animas Perdidas Purgatorio—the river of lost souls), just east of
the Sangre de Cristo (blood of Christ) mountains and about fifteen
miles north of the New Mexican border.
The town was called Trinidad, and it became the center of the
southern mining area. By 1913 it had about ten thousand people—
miners, ranchers, farmers, and businessmen. From the main high-
ways and railroad lines leading north out of Trinidad, branch rail-
ways and old wagon roads cut sharply west into the foothills of the
mountains, into the steep-walled canyons where the mining camps
lay. Scattered in these narrow canyons, on the flat bands of earth
running along the canyon bottoms, were the huts of the miners, the
mine buildings, and the mine entries.
It was a shocking contrast: the wild beauty of the Colorado
countryside against the unspeakable squalor of these mining
camps. The miners’ huts, usually shared by several families, were
made of clapboard walls and thin-planked floors, with leaking roofs,
sagging doors, broken windows, and layers of old newspapers nailed
to the walls to keep out the cold. Some families, particularly Negro
families, were forced to live in tiny squares not much bigger than
chicken coops.
Within sight of the huts were the coke ovens and the mine tipple,
where coal was emptied from the cars that carried it to the surface.
Thick clouds of soot clogged the air and settled on the ground,
strangling any shoots of grass or flowers that tried to grow there.
Wriggling along the canyon wall, behind the huts, was a now slug-
gish creek, dirty yellow and laden with the slag of the mine and the
refuse of the camp. Alongside the creek the children played, bare-
foot, ragged, and often hungry.
Each mining camp was a feudal dominion, with the company
acting as lord and master. Every camp had a marshal, a law enforce-
ment officer paid by the company. The ‘‘laws’’ were the company’s
rules. Curfews were imposed, ‘‘suspicious’’ strangers were not al-

[9]
 Howard Zinn
lowed to visit the homes, the company store had a monopoly on
goods sold in the camp. The doctor was a company doctor, the
schoolteachers hired by the company.
In the early dawn, cages carried the men down into the black-
ness of the mine. There was usually a main tunnel, with dozens of
branch tunnels leading into the ‘‘rooms,’’ held up by timbers, where
the miners hacked away at the face of the coal seam with hand picks
and their helpers shoveled the coal into waiting railroad cars. The
loaded cars were drawn along their tracks by mules to the main
shaft, where they were lifted to the surface, and then to the top of
the tipple, and then the coal showered down through the sorting
screens into flatcars.
Since the average coal seam was about three feet high, the min-
ers would often work on their knees or on their sides, never able to
straighten up. The ventilation system was a crude affair that de-
pended on the manipulation of tunnel doors by ‘‘trapper boys’’—
often thirteen or fourteen years old—who were being initiated into
the work.

The first to labor in the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company’s mines
were Welshmen and Englishmen who had gained their experience
in their mother countries. But with the great waves of immigration
from southern Europe in the 1880s and 1890s, these were joined
by Italians, Greeks, Poles, Hungarians, Montenegrins, and Serbs.
There was also a large proportion of Mexicans and Negroes.
It was a man in charge of the ‘‘Sociological Department’’ of Col-
orado Fuel & Iron who described the mine bosses and camp offi-
cials this way: ‘‘At the bottom of the pit with pick and shovel the
miner frequently found a grafting pit boss on his back. The camp su-
perintendents as a whole impress me as most uncouth, ignorant,
immoral, and in many instances the most brutal set of men that we
have ever met. Blasphemous bullies.’’
Political power in Colorado rested in the hands of those who
held economic power. This meant that the authority of Colorado

[ 10 ]
 The Colorado Coal Strike, 1913–14
Fuel & Iron and the other mine operators was virtually supreme. A
letter from company manager L. M. Bowers to the secretary of John
D. Rockefeller Jr., written in May of 1913, describes the situation:

The Colorado Fuel & Iron Company for many years was accused of be-
ing the political dictator of southern Colorado, and in fact was a
mighty power in the whole state. When I came here it was said that the
C. F. & I. voted every man and woman in their employ without any re-
gard to their being naturalized or not; and even their mules, it used to
be remarked, were registered, if they were fortunate enough to possess
names. . . . The company became notorious in many sections for their
support of the liquor interests. They established saloons everywhere
they possibly could. . . . A sheriff, elected by the votes of the C. F. & I.
Co. employees . . . established himself or became a partner in sixteen
liquor stores in our coal mines.

The Colorado attorney general who conducted an investigation

in Huerfano County in the fall of 1913, on the eve of the strike, said,
‘‘I found a very perfect political machine, just as much a machine as
Tammany in New York.’’ Another letter, from Superintendent Bow-
ers to Rockefeller shortly after the strike began, describes the co-
operation of the bankers and the governor against the strike, and
refers to Governor Ammons (a Democrat and a supporter of Presi-
dent Woodrow Wilson) as ‘‘our little cowboy governor.’’
Colorado’s deputy labor commissioner, Edwin Brake, later testi-
fied before the House Mines and Mining subcommittee that inves-
tigated the strike, ‘‘It’s very seldom you can convict anyone in Huer-
fano County if he’s got any friends. Jeff Farr, the sheriff, selects the
jury and they’re picked to convict or acquit as the case may be.’’
A Reverend Atkinson, who interviewed Governor Ammons dur-
ing the strike, asked the governor if there was constitutional law and
government in Colorado, to which Ammons replied, ‘‘Not a bit in
those counties where the coal mines are located.’’
Company officials were appointed as election judges. Company-
dominated coroners and judges prevented injured employees from
collecting damages. Polling places were often on company prop-

[ 11 ]
 Howard Zinn
erty. J. C. Baldwin, gambler and bartender, was jury foreman in 80
percent of the cases tried in his county.
Much of the land on which these camps stood had been acquired
under dubious circumstances under the provisions of the Desert
Land Act, according to a report made in 1885 by the federal Land
Commissioner.
In 1902, John D. Rockefeller Sr. bought control of the Colorado
Fuel & Iron Corporation, the largest steel and coal producer in the
West. The company produced 40 percent of the coal dug in Colo-
rado. In 1911 he turned his interests in the corporation over to his
son, John D. Rockefeller Jr., who decided major policy questions
from his office at 26 Broadway in New York City. Actual manage-
ment was handled in the Denver office of Jesse F. Welborn, chair-
man of the board of directors. By 1914 the company owned all the
land in twenty-seven camps, including the houses, the saloons, the
schools, the churches, and any other buildings within the camp
environs.
From the very beginnings of the coal mine industry in Colorado,
there was conflict between workers and management: an unsuc-
cessful strike in 1876 (the very year Colorado was admitted to the
Union), a successful strike in 1884 against a wage reduction. But the
workday was still ten hours long, and in 1894 a strike for the eight-
hour day failed.

The United Mine Workers of America was formed in 1890, ‘‘to

unite in one organization, regardless of creed, color, or nationality,
all workmen . . . employed in and around coal mines.’’ The first
United Mine Workers local in Colorado was formed in 1900, and
three years later there was an eleven-month strike, broken by
strikebreakers and the National Guard. Some of those strikebreak-
ers became the strikers of 1913.
The top leadership of the U.M.W. was often criticized by more
militant elements of the labor movement as being too conservative.

[ 12 ]
 The Colorado Coal Strike, 1913–14
And while it was the United Mine Workers who led the strike in
1913–14, members of two other organizations were on the scene
and had varying degrees of influence over the miners. These were
the I.W.W. (Industrial Workers of the World) and the Socialist
Party, which had locals in Trinidad and other Colorado cities.
The I.W.W. was formed in Chicago, in June of 1905, as a trade
union organization with a revolutionary goal. ‘‘The working class
and the employing class have nothing in common’’ was the first sen-
tence in its preamble. It reached the peak of its power in the suc-
cessful Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile strike of 1912. During the
period 1910–13, some 60,000 workers held membership cards at
various times, but the influence of the organization was far greater
than its numbers. It was an incessant prod to the regular trade
unions for more militant action.
Despite the fact that many miners voted either Progressive (for
Theodore Roosevelt) or Socialist (for Eugene Debs) in the presi-
dential election of 1912, most of the United Mine Workers leader-
ship, including the union officials in Colorado, supported the Dem-
ocratic Party. The biographer of John Lawson, who represented the
union in Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah, wrote, ‘‘John Lawson
and his miners were naı̈ve on the subject of politics. They invariably
regarded the Democratic Party as the champion of the downtrod-
den, a position that could not have been sustained had they had the
experience to draw obvious conclusions from the party’s record in
the state.’’
In December of 1912, Lawson reported to the national execu-
tive board of the union on the necessity of organizing the southern
field. Lawson and Frank Hayes, vice president of the union, set up
headquarters in Trinidad in early 1913. They asked Governor Am-
mons to arrange a conference with the mine operators. The opera-
tors refused. They would do nothing to indicate a recognition of the
union. Lawson and Hayes sent out a letter addressed to all miners
in southern Colorado:

[ 13 ]
 Howard Zinn
Greetings. This is the day of your emancipation. This is the day when
liberty and progress come to abide in your midst. We call upon you this
day to enroll as a member of the greatest and most powerful labor orga-
nization in the world, the United Mine Workers of America.

Organizers worked quietly in pairs, one outside the mines, one

inside, and support for the union grew. Clandestine meetings were
held in the countryside; picnics became an occasion for enlisting
members. And on August 16, 1913, there took place the incident
that heated the atmosphere dramatically and inexorably led to the
strike. This was the shooting of Gerald Lippiatt, a thirty-two-year-
old Italian-American organizer for the United Mine Workers, on
the street in Trinidad.
There are many versions of what happened. The only details on
which all witnesses agreed were that Lippiatt, who had just arrived
in town, had walked down Commercial Street on a busy, noisy Sat-
urday night; that he had encountered George Belcher and Walter
Belk, of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency and exchanged gun-
fire with Belcher; that Lippiatt had gotten off a shot that wounded
Belcher in the leg; and that eight shots were fired at Lippiatt, four of
which struck him. He died instantly.
Belcher and Belk were released on $10,000 bond. A coroner’s
jury was formed of six Trinidad businessmen: the manager of the
Wells-Fargo Express company, the cashier of the Trinidad National
Bank, the president of the Sherman-Cosmer Mercantile Company,
the manager of the Columbia Hotel, the proprietor of a chain
of mercantile stores, and John C. Baldwin, gambler and saloon
keeper, who acted as foreman.
The jury was told by William Daselli, a miner, that he had wit-
nessed the shooting and had been the first to reach Lippiatt. Daselli
said that Belk reached for his gun, Belcher pulled his gun and fired,
and Lippiatt fell, then fired from the ground. The jury decided that
it was a case of justifiable homicide.
Two days later, the scheduled convention of the State Federation
of Labor took place in Trinidad. An empty chair, draped in black,

[ 14 ]
 The Colorado Coal Strike, 1913–14
represented Lippiatt, and feeling ran high against the Baldwin-
Felts Agency and against the mine operators, who had hired the
agency in preparation for possible labor trouble.
Frank Hayes, tall and powerfully built, with flaming red hair,
and considered one of the few really militant officials of the United
Mine Workers board, addressed the convention:
If the Colorado mine owners, who have no regard for the miners
union, could stand at the mouth of his mine some day when the black
and swollen bodies of scores of his workmen are brought to the sur-
face, as happened at Primero and other places in this state, and could
hear the agonized cries of some mother, wife or child piteously beg-
ging that their loves ones be saved . . . they might then agree . . . that
the miners union is justified in its demand for recognition.

On August 22 the delegates left the convention. Riding north-

ward with them on the train was the coffin of Gerald Lippiatt. At
Colorado Springs, Lippiatt was buried while a crowd of miners
stood with heads bowed in the shadow of Pike’s Peak and Lippiatt’s
fiancée wept quietly.
A letter from the U.M.W. policy committee was sent to fifty op-
erators in southern Colorado asking for a conference. No reply
came. Another letter invited the operators to a miners’ convention
to be held in Trinidad in mid-September. Again no reply.
Meanwhile, organizing was going on at a rapid rate. Miners from
all the coal canyons in southern Colorado were being signed up as
union members. Secret meetings were held in churches, at picnics,
in abandoned workings hidden in the mountains. At hundreds of
meetings, delegates were elected to represent the coal camps at the
Trinidad convention.
At the same time, the mine operators were not idle. The Bald-
win-Felts Agency began importing hundreds of men from the sa-
loons and barrel-houses of Denver, and from points outside the
state, to help break the impending strike. In Huerfano County, by
the first of September, 326 men had been deputized by Sheriff Jeff
Farr, all armed and paid by the coal companies.

[ 15 ]
 Howard Zinn
On Monday, September 15, 1913, there was a parade of miners
through the streets of Trinidad, and then the largest labor conven-
tion in Colorado history began its sessions. Two hundred and eighty
delegates, representing every mine in Colorado as well as some in
New Mexico and Utah, sat in the great opera house and sweated in
the late summer heat.
For two days the convention’s Scale and Policy Committee lis-
tened to the complaints of rank-and-file miners, who reported that
they were being cheated to the tune of 400–800 pounds on each ton
of coal; that the law allowing miners to elect checkweighmen of
their own choice was being completely ignored; that they were paid
in script worth ninety cents on the dollar (a violation of Colorado
law); that the promise of an eight-hour day made by Colorado
Fuel & Iron earlier that year had been ignored; that their wages
could only be spent in company stores and saloons, where prices
were from 25 to 40 percent higher; that they were forced to vote ac-
cording to the wishes of the mine superintendent; that they were
beaten and discharged for voicing complaints; and that armed
guards conducted a reign of terror that kept the miners in subjec-
tion to the company.
A set of demands was adopted: recognition of the union was key,
followed by the eight-hour day, wage increases, pay for ‘‘dead work’’
(laying tracks, shoring up the roof, etc.), elected checkweighmen,
free choice of stores, boarding houses, and doctors, and the aboli-
tion of the guard system.
The operators claimed that the miners earned $20 a week, but
the Colorado Bureau of Labor Statistics put their average take-
home pay at $1.68 a day.
Perhaps what aroused the miners to rebellion more than any-
thing was the refusal of the mine operators to spend money to in-
sure the safety of the men as they worked hundreds of feet below
the surface. There had been deadly explosions in the southern Col-
orado mines again and again. There were two primary causes for
mine disasters: rotten timbers holding up the roofs of the caverns

[ 16 ]
 The Colorado Coal Strike, 1913–14
where the miners dug their coal, and the accumulation of gas and
dust in dry conditions under which the gas ignited easily.
The Colorado Fuel & Iron Company’s Primero mine was sprin-
kled only when the dust became thick enough to prevent the pas-
sage of the mules. The miners had a saying that the operators would
‘‘rather kill a man than maim a mule.’’ In 1907 an explosion at Pri-
mero had killed twenty-four men; three years later another explo-
sion had killed seventy-nine. In response, Colorado Fuel & Iron of-
ficial L. M. Bowers said that such accidents ‘‘will happen and we
have to make the best of it. . . . Work will be resumed as soon as the
miners get over the excitement.’’
In 1910 the Starkville mine, where the state labor commissioner
had previously reported a failure to sprinkle, suffered a frightful ex-
plosion. Forty miners were killed; rescuers were kept out of the
mine during daylight hours so as not to cause panic. A spokesman
for Colorado Fuel & Iron insisted Starkville was nongaseous. Four
weeks later, a mine at Delagua, this one belonging to the Victor-
American company, also exploded, killing eighty-two.
By the time the labor convention took place in Trinidad on Sep-
tember 15, 1913, the grievances had accumulated. When Mother
Jones dramatically appeared to address the delegates, they were
ready to be aroused.

Mary Jones, whom the miners came to call Mother, was born Mary
Harris in Ireland, where as a child she had seen British troops
march through the streets with the heads of Irishmen stuck on their
bayonets, and where her grandfather had been hanged during the
fight for Irish freedom. Her family had emigrated to Canada,
and Mary, then in her twenties, moved to Michigan and then to
Memphis, working as a dressmaker and a schoolteacher. At thirty-
one, she married an ironworker named George Jones, and they had
four children.
In 1867, a yellow fever epidemic struck Memphis. All of Mary
Jones’s children and her husband died. At the age of thirty-seven

[ 17 ]
 Howard Zinn
she left for Chicago, where she worked as a seamstress, later recall-
ing, ‘‘Often while sewing for the lords and barons who lived in mag-
nificent houses on the Lake Shore Drive, I would look out of the
plate glass windows and see the poor, shivering wretches, jobless
and hungry, walking alongside the frozen lake front.’’
She began attending meetings of the Knights of Labor, then the
only national union that admitted women, and in the 1890s began
organizing for the United Mine Workers. In 1903, with 100,000
miners on strike in Pennsylvania, including 16,000 children under
age sixteen, she led a group of children on a twenty-two-day march
to New York to confront President Theodore Roosevelt at his Oyster
Bay home. She never found him there, but on the way she spoke at
meetings of working people about child labor. In her autobiography
she describes one of those meetings, near the Philadelphia city hall:
‘‘I put the little boys with their fingers off and hands crushed and
maimed on a platform. I held up their mutilated hands and showed
them to the crowd and made the statement that Philadelphia’s man-
sions were built on the broken bones, the quivering hearts and
drooping heads of these children.’’
Mother Jones was scathing in her denunciation of politicians,
like the congressmen who passed legislation on behalf of the rail-
roads but did nothing for working people. ‘‘I asked a man in prison
once how he happened to get there. He had stolen a pair of shoes. I
told him if he had stolen a railroad he could be a United States Sena-
tor.’’ She was equally scornful of union leaders who compromised
with employers, like United Mine Workers president John Mitch-
ell. In her autobiography she wrote, ‘‘Mr. Mitchell died a rich man,
distrusted by the working people whom he once served.’’

When the Colorado strike began, Mother Jones had just come from
the coalfields of West Virginia. ‘‘Medieval West Virginia!’’ she
called it later. ‘‘With its tent colonies on the bleak hills! With its grim
men and women! When I get to the other side, I shall tell God Al-
mighty about West Virginia!’’

[ 18 ]
 The Colorado Coal Strike, 1913–14
She stood on the platform in Trinidad that September of 1913 in
a prim black dress embroidered with white lace, wisps of silvery
hair curling around her forehead, a black bonnet on her head. She
was five feet tall and weighed a hundred pounds. She addressed the
delegates: ‘‘The question that arises today in the nation is an indus-
trial oligarchy. . . . What would the coal in these mines and in these
hills be worth unless you put your strength and muscle in to bring
[it out]?’’
She was an immigrant and had an instinctive understanding of
the feelings of workers who had come from Italy, Poland, Greece,
and other countries of southern and eastern Europe:

A reporter for a Pittsburgh paper was once out here and was speaking
to a manager of one of the C. F. & I. mines. He asked why the place was
not propped safely and the manager humanely replied: ‘‘Oh damn it,
dagos are cheaper than props.’’ I want to say there are no dagos in this
country! It has been the game that has been played down the history
of the ruling class to divide the working class.

Mother Jones had been on the platform in 1905 when the radical
Industrial Workers of the World was formed. She had written arti-
cles for the International Socialist Review. But her revolutionary
spirit was uniquely her own, and she gave no unconditional loyalty
to any organization. She began by telling the Colorado workers
about West Virginia.

Three thousand men assembled in Charlestown and we marched up

with banners . . . and we walked into the state house grounds, for they
are ours, and we have a right to take possession of them if we want
to. . . . Now don’t get on your knees. We have got no kings in America.
Stand on both your feet with your head erect, said I, and present that
document to the governor. . . . Don’t wait, and don’t say your honor,
said I, because very few of those fellows have any honor and didn’t
know what it is! . . .
Sure we’ll get in the bull pen. There is nothing about that. I was in
jail. God Almighty, what if you do, you built the jail! I was jailed . . . and
tried in Federal court and the old judge said: ‘‘Did you read my injunc-

[ 19 ]
 Howard Zinn
tion?’’ I said I did. ‘‘Did you notice that that injunction told you not to
look at the mines and did you look at them?’’ ‘‘Certainly,’’ I said. ‘‘Why
did you do it?’’ the judge said. ‘‘Because there was a judge bigger than
you, and he gave me my eyesight, and I am going to look at whatever I
want to.’’

The convention exploded with laughter and applause, and then

grew quiet as Mother Jones said, ‘‘You have . . . created more wealth
than they in a thousand years of the Roman Republic, and yet you
have not any. . . . When I get Colorado, Kansas and Alabama orga-
nized, I will tell God Almighty to take me to my rest. But not until
then!’’
The convention voted unanimously to strike on September 23,
and both sides intensified their preparations. The coal operators,
under the leadership of Colorado Fuel & Iron, met at Colorado
Springs, deciding to stand together and resist the union’s demands.
With evictions of miners from the mining camps quickly under
way, the U.M.W. leased land just outside the bounds of company
property and ordered tents. Funds were made available by the
union to meet the needs of the strikers.
On the day of the walkout 11,000 miners, about 90 percent of the
workforce, gathered up their belongings and left their homes in the
camps. As they did so, rain began to fall, turning to sleet and snow,
but it did not stop the procession of pushcarts and mule wagons,
piled high with furniture and personal possessions and tiny chil-
dren. Wheels sank through the ice into the mud, but they moved on.
A reporter for the Denver Express called it ‘‘an exodus of woe, of a
people leaving known fears for new terrors, a hopeless people seek-
ing new hope, a people born to suffering going forth to new suf-
fering.’’
Mother Jones later recalled that twenty-eight wagon loads of
personal belongings came into the Ludlow colony alone that day, on
roads deep in mud, with the horses weary and mothers carrying
tiny babies in their arms. Tents and mattresses were wet, and the
children had to sleep on those mattresses that night.

[ 20 ]
 The Colorado Coal Strike, 1913–14
A thousand additional tents that had supposedly been shipped
from West Virginia had not arrived, and so in this colony and others
many families huddled beneath makeshift shelters or under their
wagons. Snow continued to fall for two days, and one observer
wrote that ‘‘the elements seemed to be in league with the opera-
tors.’’ It took four days before the tents arrived. By then the sun had
appeared, the snows had melted, sanitary trenches and storage pits
had been dug, stoves installed, tent floors timbered.
Ludlow was the largest miners’ colony, set up at a railroad depot
eighteen miles north of Trinidad on a direct line to Walsenburg, at
the edge of Colorado Fuel & Iron property. Near the Ludlow depot
there were a Greek bakery, a few saloons, a post office, a few stores.
There were four hundred tents here, for a thousand people, over a
quarter of whom were children. In the course of the strike, twenty-
one babies were born in these tents.
At Ludlow a wooden stage was built for meetings, and a large
tent was set up for use as a school and as a kind of community cen-
ter. Committees were elected to arrange for sanitation and enter-
tainment. Miners’ colonies were also set up at Aguilar, Forbes, Sop-
ris, Segundo, and Walsenburg.

The Ludlow encampment was described later by Major Edward

Boughton, who was adjutant-general of the Colorado National
Guard: ‘‘The colony numbered hundreds of people of whom only a
few families were Americans. The rest were for the most part
Greeks, Montenegrins, Bulgars, Servians, Italians, Mexicans, Tyro-
leans, Croatians, Austrians, Savoyards, and other aliens from the
Southern countries of Europe.’’ Twenty-two different languages
were spoken in the colony.
Violence between strikers and company men began almost im-
mediately, and it can’t be said with certainty which side committed
the first act. Throughout the months of the strike, acts of violence
by one side were met with retaliation from the other. But surely it
was not an even match. Miners with rifles were arrayed against not

[ 21 ]
 Howard Zinn
only the machine guns of the Baldwin-Felts operatives but also the
power of the state and its enforcers of ‘‘law and order.’’ By the end
of the strike, most of those dead and injured were miners and their
families.
Near the Segundo railroad depot, five Greek strikers were doing
some sabotage on a company-built footbridge across the Purgatory
River when Bob Lee, chief guard at the Segundo coking plants and
now a deputy sheriff, arrived. Lee was known to both miners and
mine guards as a bully who victimized miners’ wives as well as their
husbands. Lee was on horseback, and as he rode towards the
Greeks at the bridge he drew a rifle from the scabbard at the side of
his saddle; but one of the Greeks fired first, the buckshot tearing
into Lee’s throat, killing him instantly.
The newly established U.S. Department of Labor tried to medi-
ate between the U.M.W. and the mining operators, but the man-
ager of Colorado Fuel & Iron, L. M. Bowers, distrusted the media-
tor, and wrote to Rockefeller that the companies would stand firm
against the union until ‘‘our bones were bleached as white as chalk
in these Rocky Mountains.’’ Rockefeller replied that he agreed
with this position. ‘‘Whatever the outcome we will stand by you to
the end.’’
The Baldwin-Felts Agency constructed a special auto with a
Gatling gun mounted on top, which became known as the Death
Special. This auto, its sides armored, roamed the countryside with
several agents carrying rifles in the front seat. On October 17, the
Death Special attacked the tent colony at Forbes, killing one man
and wounding two. A ten-year-old boy was left with nine bullets in
his leg. In his book Buried Unsung, Zeese Papanikolas writes, ‘‘If
there is anything that can account for the unconditional hatred the
strikers would later show for the guards, for the panic that would
sweep through those tents in waves throughout the rest of the
strike, it is Forbes.’’
Meanwhile, hundreds of strikebreakers came into the area in a
steady stream. They were deputized and paid $3.50 a day plus ex-

[ 22 ]
 The Colorado Coal Strike, 1913–14
penses. Wholesale arrests began. The sight of strikebreakers com-
ing into the canyons aroused the strikers to fury. When they were
intercepted, they were manhandled, once by a crowd of miners’
wives and children. Buildings at the Primrose mine were dyna-
mited. A gun battle took place between seventeen mounted mine
guards and a group of strikers near the Ludlow colony. The opera-
tors told Governor Ammons that they had been attacked by ‘‘forty
Greek and Montenegrin sharpshooters from the Balkan war.’’
Wholesale arrests of strikers continued. A few weeks after the
start of the strike, forty-nine miners were marched to Trinidad be-
tween two rows of armed guards, with the Death Special crawling
along to the rear, its guns trained on the strikers’ backs. As the pro-
cession neared town, G. E. Jones, a member of the Western Federa-
tion of Miners, one of the founding unions of the I.W.W., tried to
photograph the armed car. Albert C. Felts, manager of the Baldwin-
Felts Agency, beat him senseless with the butt of his pistol while the
deputies’ rifles were trained on the man’s body; then Jones was ar-
rested for disturbing the peace.
Bowers reported to Rockefeller, ‘‘We are on top of a volcano.
When men such as these [Department of Labor mediators], to-
gether with the cheap college professors and still cheaper writers in
muck-raking magazines, supplemented by a lot of milk-and-water
preachers . . . are permitted to assault the businessmen who have
built up the great industries . . . it is time that vigorous measures are
taken to put a stop to these vicious teachings.’’
Bowers also pointed to the threat to company’s profits: ‘‘Our net
earnings would have been the largest in the history of the company
by $200,000, but for the increase in wages paid the employees dur-
ing the last few months. . . . It is mighty discouraging to have this vi-
cious gang come into our state and not only destroy our profit but
eat into that which has heretofore been saved.’’
On October 26, a steel-clad train manned by 190 guards with
machine guns and rifles headed for the Ludlow colony. It was inter-
cepted by a detachment of armed miners and turned back after a

[ 23 ]
 Howard Zinn
pitched battle in which one mine guard was killed. The New York
Times reported, ‘‘The situation is extremely critical tonight. More
than 700 armed strikers are reported to be in the field against the
mine guards.’’ The use of the word ‘‘reported’’ suggested that the
number had been exaggerated.
By the end of October there had been at least four battles be-
tween strikers and guards, and at least nine men had been killed.
On October 28, Governor Ammons declared martial law. He also is-
sued an order forbidding the import of strikebreakers from outside
the state, but this was largely ignored.
The tent colonies were now in a state of siege, with machine
guns and high-powered searchlights perched above them on inac-
cessible ridges, constantly aimed at the tents. The miners protested
that their families could not sleep because of the glare, and the op-
erators replied that if this was true they could pitch their tents far-
ther from the coal properties.
Both sides were accumulating guns. Ethelbert Stewart, the De-
partment of Labor’s emissary and a man sympathetic to the miners,
wrote to Washington, ‘‘If Caliban learns his master’s language and
uses it to curse him, the blame can not be all Caliban’s. For Caliban
will and must learn something, and the only language common to
all, and which all understand in southern Colorado, is the voice of
the gun.’’
On October 29, 1913, Governor Ammons ordered General John
Chase, of the Colorado National Guard, to move his troops into
the strike area. Chase was a Denver ophthalmologist, a gentleman
farmer, and a church organist, but when he put on his National
Guard uniform he saw himself in noble battle with socialists and
anarchists. He had missed serving in the Spanish American War
and had dreams of military grandeur. The pressures on the gover-
nor to call out the Guard are spelled out in a letter from L. M. Bow-
ers to Rockefeller’s New York office: ‘‘You will be interested to know
that we have been able to secure the cooperation of all the bankers
of the city, who have had three or four interviews with our little

[ 24 ]
 The Colorado Coal Strike, 1913–14
cowboy governor, agreeing to back the State and lend it all funds
necessary to maintain the militia and afford ample protection so our
miners could return to work.’’
Bowers’s letter reveals a fundamental truth about labor struggles
in American history—that powerful corporations have almost al-
ways found useful allies in the government and the press: ‘‘Besides
the bankers, the chamber of commerce, the real estate exchange,
together with a great many of the best business men, have been
urging the governor to take steps to drive these vicious agitators out
of the state. Another mighty power has been rounded up on behalf
of the operators by the getting together of fourteen of the editors of
the most important newspapers in the state.’’
The Colorado National Guard, under General Chase’s com-
mand, consisted of two cavalry troops, two incomplete infantry reg-
iments, one detachment of field artillery, a hospital corps, and a sig-
nal corps. The Guard had 14 horses at first, but bought 279 more;
the mine owners paid for the keep of the horses. Six autos were
used, two paid for by the operators. The enlisted personnel, ac-
cording to an official report of the Adjutant-General’s Office of Col-
orado, were mostly ‘‘small property-owners, clerks, professional
men, farmers.’’ There were about a thousand soldiers under Chase’s
command, although two thousand persons were on duty in the
strike zone at various times.
The miners, having faced in the first five weeks of the strike what
they considered a reign of terror at the hands of the private guards,
now looked forward to the National Guard to ‘‘restore order.’’ They
did not know that the governor was sending these troops under
pressure from the mine operators.
On the day before the Guard was due to arrive, several hundred
miners camped at Ludlow put together their pennies and nickels to
buy a large American flag, which flew the next morning over one of
the strangest sights in Colorado history. Stretching for a mile along
the road, from the tents of the Ludlow colony to the depot of the
Colorado and Southern Railroad, were a thousand men, women,

[ 25 ]
 Howard Zinn
and children. They had been starving slowly for the past month,
and it showed in their gaunt faces, their tired bodies. But they
were dressed in their Sunday best, the miners’ children decked
out in white, all waving little American flags, and shouting shrill
welcomes in English, Greek, Italian, and a dozen other tongues. A
newly improvised and pitifully discordant band, dressed in faded
but still colorful Greek and Serbian army uniforms, played ‘‘The
Union Forever.’’
From the railway station came the first troop of cavalry, led by
General Chase himself on a prancing white stallion. In the dust
kicked up by the horses’ hooves rumbled a small detachment of
field artillery. Then two regiments of infantrymen, marching pre-
cisely, in wide-brimmed hats and yellow leggings. They were com-
manded by Lieutenant Linderfelt, a stocky veteran of other wars.
Men, women, and children shouted and sang until the last contin-
gent had disappeared past the tent colony, down Berwind Canyon.
But soon the same people who had wept with relief at the sight
of the National Guard were bitterly mourning their dead and pray-
ing for deliverance from what they called ‘‘cavemen dressed in
khaki.’’

In the last months of 1913, a committee was set up by the State Fed-
eration of Labor to respond to a challenge from the governor to
prove accusations of brutality against the Guard. The committee
was headed by Professor James Brewster, of the University of Colo-
rado law school. It heard from 163 witnesses, the testimony filling
760 typewritten pages, telling of soldiers assaulting women and
children and torturing prisoners. The National Guard made 172 ar-
rests that winter. Among the incidents described in the Brewster re-
port were the following:
Mary Thomas, a Welsh woman, mother of two, five feet tall with
long red hair, was held for three weeks in a vermin-ridden cell.
One of the arrested strikers was forced to sleep on an icy cement
floor. He died after twenty-five days.

[ 26 ]
 The Colorado Coal Strike, 1913–14
A nineteen-year-old girl, pregnant, was dragged through an
alley by guardsmen in the night until she lost consciousness.
Mrs. Yankinski, a miner’s wife, was at home with her four chil-
dren when militiamen broke in and stole her money. Before they
left, one kicked her little girl in the face, breaking her nose.
In the town of Segundo, a group of drunken guardsmen forced
a group of children to march about the city for two hours, prodding
them with bayonets to keep them moving.
Marco Zeni, a miner, was forced to stay awake in his cell for five
days by soldiers who threw water in his face and jabbed him contin-
ually with bayonets.
A teen-age boy who had welcomed the National Guard, who had
waved and sang as Lieutenant Karl Linderfelt led his infantry
troops past the tents, was later attacked by the powerfully built of-
ficer, who came across the boy on a road near the strikers’ colony
and knocked him unconscious with his fists. At another point the
lieutenant told a miner, ‘‘I am Jesus Christ, and my men on horses
are Jesus Christs—and we must be obeyed.’’
Karl Linderfelt, who was to become known for his viciousness in
the course of the strike, had served in the Philippine War of 1900–
1901, a war in which Filipino civilians, including women and chil-
dren, had been massacred. In many ways the Philippine War re-
sembles the later war in Vietnam—with atrocities committed by
American soldiers, ‘‘search and destroy’’ missions, the dismember-
ment of enemy dead. Linderfelt had served in the Northern Luzon
area of the Philippines, where few prisoners were taken and vil-
lages were burned.
Lieutenant Linderfelt held a special hatred for one striker,
Louis Tikas, the leader of the Ludlow colony. Tikas was twenty-
seven years old when the strike began. He had arrived in the United
States from Greece when he was twenty, just at the time when the
owners of the steel mills and mines of the West, who had been im-
porting black labor from the South, decided it would be more
profitable to hire recently arrived immigrants, like the Greeks, who

[ 27 ]
 Howard Zinn
might be intimidated by their new surroundings and would work
for less.
Lou Tikas had had the benefit of a college education in Greece,
and he was held in great affection by the miners. He was close to
them in a way that John Lawson and other union officials could not
be. One day at the end of November 1913, Lieutenant Linderfelt
found Tikas alone and unarmed, beat him brutally, and had him
dragged off to jail. John Lawson wired Governor Ammons: ‘‘We
have reason to believe that it is Linderfelt’s deliberate purpose to
provoke the strikers to bloodshed. He has threatened to kill Louis
Tikas.’’
In December of 1913, Lou Tikas and fifteen other prisoners of
the Guard, among them Louis King, a black striker, lay in an ice-
cold jail cell in Trinidad, with no charges yet brought against them.
At this very time, Rockefeller was writing to his manager Bowers,
‘‘You are fighting a good fight, which is not only in the interest of
your own company, but of other companies of Colorado and of the
business interests of the entire country and of the laboring classes,
quite as much.’’
One of the prisoners held with Tikas was another union orga-
nizer, Mike Livoda. Livoda was a Croatian who had come to Amer-
ica in 1903, worked in the Ohio steel mills, then headed west to the
Colorado mines, where he became a U.M.W. organizer for three
and a half dollars a day and expenses.
A month after Livoda arrived in Colorado, he had been taken
into custody by four men who brought him to Jeff Farr, the notori-
ous sheriff of Huerfano County. Farr asked his men, ‘‘Is that the
son of a bitch?’’ He then told Livoda, ‘‘I’m king of this county. And
if you want to do any of your dirty work you’ll have to do it in Las
Animas, not here.’’ Livoda was put out on the railroad tracks and
told to start walking. When he showed up in Huerfano County
again, he was beaten, warned to get out of Colorado, and sent
on his way. He walked for four hours into Walsenburg, where he

[ 28 ]
 The Colorado Coal Strike, 1913–14
found refuge in the shop of a Jewish tailor. Then he continued his
work.
On December 15, 1913, Livoda, Tikas, and the other prisoners
were released from jail. Livoda said later, ‘‘You know, when a fellow
is fighting for something good he doesn’t mind, even if they send
him to jail. That is how I felt while I was in that dark, stuffy cell, and
I was so happy I just keeping singing union songs all the time.’’
All that fall, the miners had been committing acts of violence
against company employees who remained on the job. In early No-
vember, strikebreaker Pedro Armijo was shot to death while pass-
ing near the tent colony at Aguilar, one of the largest towns in the
mine area, inhabited mostly by union people. At about the same
time, Herbert Smith, a mine clerk scabbing in a Colorado Fuel &
Iron mine, was brutally beaten near Trinidad. Two days later, four
mine guards were killed at Laved while escorting another scab.
That same month, George Belcher, the killer of U.M.W. orga-
nizer Gerald Lippiatt, was leaving a Trinidad drugstore and stopped
on the corner to light a cigar. Hundreds of soldiers were in the
square, plus fifty deputies and a number of detectives. As Belcher
struck a match, a bullet from an unseen rifle entered the base of his
brain, killing him instantly. Although several union men were ar-
rested, no evidence was ever produced and the case went unsolved.
The miners were reacting not only to the killing of Lippiatt,
which they had not forgotten, but also to the machine gun attacks
on the tent colonies by the Baldwin-Felts agents, to the clandestine
importation of strikebreakers, and to the depredations of the Na-
tional Guard.

In the month of December 1913, Colorado experienced the worst

snow seen in thirty years—forty-two inches fell on Denver. Colo-
rado Fuel & Iron officials thought the storms might compel the
miners to leave the tents for ‘‘the comfortable houses and employ-
ment at the mines,’’ as they put it in one of their memos. But they

[ 29 ]
 Howard Zinn
did not understand the miners. And it was this lack of comprehen-
sion, and their frustration at the miners’ refusal to surrender even
under horrendous conditions, that led the mine operators to esca-
late their attempts to break the strike. The governor became their
instrument.
Early in December, Governor Ammons rescinded his original
order forbidding strikebreakers to come in from outside the state.
It had been ignored in any event, but now that it had been with-
drawn the National Guard openly protected the strikebreakers, es-
corting them to the mines.
The railroad junction of Ludlow became a battleground. Black
men from the South and recent immigrants from the Balkans were
brought in. Often they were not told that a strike was on. The trains
carrying them into the district often had the blinds drawn, the
doors locked. As they got off the train they were jeered by people
from the Ludlow tent colony—men, women, children—who were
lined up at the depot. When found alone, strikebreakers were
often beaten.
There were other kinds of encounters. Three black strikebreak-
ers were captured, given food in the Ludlow colony, then released.
Another day, strikers intercepted several Greeks at the Walsenburg
depot, took them to the house of a miner in Walsenburg, made them
a meal, and convinced them to support the union. But when their
host, Kostas Markos, took them into town, they were surrounded
by militiamen. Markos, who was carrying a gun, was beaten and
thrown into jail. The Greeks were forced into a mine.
Kostas Markos was kept on the damp cement floor of a cell in the
basement of the Walsenburg courthouse for twenty-two days. He
was ill with rheumatism, but no doctor came to see him. Shortly af-
ter his release from prison he died. Later testimony before a sub-
committee of the House Mines and Mining Committee appointed
to determine whether federal laws were being violated in respect
to peonage disclosed that ‘‘Salvatore Valentin, a Sicilian, told the
committee that he had been brought from Pittsburgh through de-

[ 30 ]
 The Colorado Coal Strike, 1913–14
ception and forced to work in the Delagua mine. One of his fellow
strikebreakers, he said, was shot and killed in the mines by an un-
known person.’’
Witnesses before the committee made dozens of accusations of
peonage. Strikebreakers were deceived about the existence of a
strike. At one point a contingent of workers from St. Louis disem-
barked from the train in Colorado and were surprised to find them-
selves ‘‘protected’’ by militiamen with unsheathed bayonets. At the
end of January, fifty Bulgarians brought in to work at Tabasco Can-
yon who had been told there was no strike discovered otherwise.
They evaded their guards and fled through the snow to the Ludlow
colony, where Lou Tikas saw to it that they were fed, and, together
with others who had made their way to Ludlow, brought into Trini-
dad to give affidavits to union attorneys.
Through all of this, the National Guard had its hands full trying
to keep Mother Jones out of the strike area. General Chase had said,
‘‘She will be jailed immediately if she comes to Trinidad. I am not
going to give her a chance to make any more speeches here. She is
dangerous because she inflames the minds of the strikers.’’
On January 4, 1914, Mother Jones set out from Denver ‘‘to help
my boys.’’ She was then eighty-three years old. Arriving in Trinidad,
she was immediately arrested and put on a train back to Denver.
General Chase declared that if she returned to the strike zone she
would be held incommunicado. She responded defiantly that she
would return ‘‘when Colorado is made part of the United States.’’
Speaking in Denver to union people she said, ‘‘I serve notice on the
governor that this state doesn’t belong to him—it belongs to the na-
tion and I own a share of stock in it. Ammons or Chase either one
can shoot me, but I will talk from the grave.’’
She left again for Trinidad on January 12, walking through the
railroad yard to get on the train undetected by the detectives posted
on the platform in the station. She got off at an unscheduled stop
north of Trinidad, walked into town, and made her way to the Toltec
Hotel. She spent three hours in her room, across the street from mi-

[ 31 ]
 Howard Zinn
litia headquarters, before she was discovered. As a hundred and
fifty militiamen surrounded the hotel, General Chase entered her
room and took her into custody. She was taken to a hospital on the
outskirts of Trinidad, where five guards kept a twenty-four-hour
watch over her.
Mother Jones had been imprisoned for ten days when women
began to arrive in Trinidad from all over the state, women who had
heard her speak and been inspired. At one time she had told them,
This earth was made for you, was it not? And it was here a long time
before the Colorado Fuel & Iron came upon it. When the C. F. & I.
came upon this earth they did not get a mortgage on it, did they? No
they did not. The earth was here long before they came, and it will be
here when their rotten carcasses burn up in hell. . . . You will be free.
Poverty and misery will be unknown. We will turn the jails into play-
grounds for the children. We will build homes, and not dog kennels
and shacks as you have them now. . . . You men and women will have to
stand and fight.

Now they gathered a thousand strong at the train station to pro-

test the jailing of Mother Jones. With an Italian woman carrying
the American flag at the head of the parade, they began to march
through the town.
They soon found their path blocked by National Guard cavalry-
men, sabers drawn, led personally by General Chase, who pranced
back and forth on his horse before the first rank of guardsmen. Chase
called on the women to turn back, but they would not. Chase found a
sixteen-year-old girl, Sarah Slater, in his path, and when she did not
respond to his command he kicked at her with his stirruped foot. His
horse bolted and Chase fell onto the street as the women jeered.
The general got back on his horse and shouted to his troops,
‘‘Ride down the women!’’ The cavalrymen charged into the crowd,
tearing banners and flags from the women’s hands and swinging
their sabers. Several women were slashed. A soldier brought his ri-
fle butt down hard on Sarah Slater’s toes. (General Chase said later
that this was an effective method of mob control.)

[ 32 ]
 The Colorado Coal Strike, 1913–14
Eighteen marchers were arrested. Mary Thomas, the diminu-
tive Welsh mother of two, was not in the parade, but she had
watched from the sidewalk and taunted the soldiers. She was
dragged off and put in a cell along with her daughters, three and
four years old. She told later how she sang to supporters gathered
outside the jail until the police drove the crowd away. Mary Thomas
and her children were kept in jail for three weeks.
Chase had so many prisoners by now that he set up a ‘‘military
commission’’ to try the overload. The committee consisted of a
Pueblo banker, a Denver physician, a manufacturer, an attorney, a
businessman, and a Montrose real estate man. Major Edward
Boughton, a Denver and Cripple Creek attorney, was made the
commission’s judge advocate.
Mother Jones was held incommunicado for ten weeks, with six
soldiers guarding her day and night. She spoke later of having
friendly conversations with some of them. Finally she was put on a
train for Denver, guarded by a National Guard colonel.
The State Federation of Labor’s Brewster committee, after hear-
ing all the testimony about the brutality of the National Guard,
addressed itself to the governor in early 1914: ‘‘We ask, sir, your
solemn consideration of this question. How much longer will work-
ingmen continue to follow the Stars and Stripes when they repeat-
edly see the principles for which the Stars and Stripes have stood
contemptuously disregarded by those in whose hands, for a time,
lies might without right?’’
The committee recommended that General Chase either resign
or be removed; that three of the Guard officers, including Lieuten-
ant Linderfelt, be suspended; that the private guards paid by the
coal operators be discharged; that no workers be brought in under
deception. The governor followed none of the recommendations,
saying that the committee had heard only one side. There was truth
to this, since guardsmen had not been permitted to testify before
the committee.

[ 33 ]
 Howard Zinn
February and March of 1914 were cold months and quiet ones.
Only occasionally could a burst of gunfire be heard in the hills. But
hunger and freezing temperatures plagued the miners and their
families. As Zeese Papanikolas describes it,

Winter had hit hard at the people in the camps. . . . At Ludlow the
paths worn between the tents and the privies or the coal piles or Snod-
grass’ little tin-sided store turned sludgy between the drifts of dirty
snow or slicked over with ice. Water froze in the barrels outside the
tents. When it stormed, gangs of men pulled the snow off the sagging
tent roofs to keep them from crashing down. The men still went out
with shovels and picks and a loop of wire looking for rabbits, but there
were thirteen hundred mouths to feed in Ludlow alone and the game
was getting pushed back deeper and deeper into the hills. The strike
benefits never stretched far enough to fill the strikers’ bellies. They
were hungry in the camps, and they began to wear on one another. The
women spent days huddled under their blankets with the children in
the biting cold.

Papanikolas also observes, ‘‘In a certain subtle but elemental

way the course of the strike had changed the real nature of the rela-
tions of women and men.’’ The importance of the women in the
family was never more evident. Not only were they out on the picket
lines, often with their children, but they carried the coal and the
water, did the cooking and the mending of clothes, held the fami-
lies together.
As the strike wore on, the radical elements among the miners
were active in maintaining morale, in bringing to the miners the
larger implications of the strike—the class struggle going on in the
United States and the world, the possibility of a better way of life.
The Trinidad branch of the Socialist Party held meetings through-
out the strike zone. A left-wing socialist, George Falconer, visited
Colorado and reported that at a meeting of two hundred miners in
Starkville, he and an Italian socialist named Amando Pelizzari were
arrested. At Ludlow, over five hundred miners and their families
gathered in the big tent to hear socialist speeches and take litera-

[ 34 ]
 The Colorado Coal Strike, 1913–14
ture, while armed soldiers waited outside on the snow-clad plain. At
a meeting in Aguilar, company soldiers surrounded the hall. In
Walsenburg six hundred miners attended.
With the spring approaching, the mine operators began to listen
to the incessant complaints of Governor Ammons. The state was
heavily in debt to the bankers. Funds were running out for main-
taining the National Guard. The payroll alone was $30,000 a month,
and critics pointed to the disproportionate number of officers in the
guard—397 officers to 695 privates. As the state grew less and less
able to pay salaries, the regular enlisted militia began to drop out.
Taking the places of many of these men, wearing the same uni-
forms, were the mine guards of Colorado Fuel & Iron, still drawing
pay from the company.
In early April of 1914, without warning, Governor Ammons re-
called the bulk of the Colorado National Guard. Only thirty-five
men in Company B, mostly former mine guards, were left. On April
18, a hundred deputies in the pay of Colorado Fuel & Iron were
formed into Troop A of the National Guard and sent to join Com-
pany B. The designated spot: a rocky ridge overlooking the thou-
sand men, women, and children who lived in the tent colony at
Ludlow.
The two officers selected to take charge were Major Pat Ham-
rock, a local saloon keeper, and a man well known to the residents
of Ludlow, Lieutenant Karl Linderfelt. Linderfelt’s men in Troop A,
according to a report to the governor by Major Boughton, were ‘‘su-
perintendents, foremen, the clerical force, physicians, storekeep-
ers, mine guards, and other residents of the coal camps.’’
On April 19, 1914, Easter Sunday for the Greek Orthodox
Church, a group of the Ludlow strikers were picnicking in a nearby
meadow. It was one of the first sunny days of spring, and they were
playing baseball. Over the hill from the north came five gunmen on
horseback, rifles slung over their shoulders. They stopped near the
players, and one of them shouted, ‘‘Have your fun today! We’ll have
our roast tomorrow.’’

[ 35 ]
 Howard Zinn
On Monday morning, April 20, the Ludlow colonists were still
sleeping in their tents when the quiet of dawn was shaken by a vio-
lent explosion. Rushing from their tents, the strikers could see col-
umns of black smoke rising slowly to the sky from the hill where the
militia were stationed. Major Hamrock had exploded two dynamite
bombs as a signal.
For a little while the countryside was unbearably still and tense.
Then, at exactly 9:00 a.m., the dull clatter of a machine gun began
and the first bullets ripped through the canvas of the tents. The clat-
ter became a deafening roar as more machine guns went into ac-
tion. One of the people who died was Frank Snyder. He was ten
years old. His father told about it afterward: ‘‘The boy Frank was sit-
ting on the floor . . . and he was in the act of stooping to kiss or caress
his sister. . . . I was standing near the front door of my tent and I
heard the impact of the bullet striking the boy’s head and the crack
. . . as it exploded inside of his brain.’’
Mingling with the gunfire were the wild cries of women as they
ran from tent to tent, hugging children to their breasts, seeking
shelter. Some managed to run off into the hills and hide in nearby
ranch houses. Others crawled into the dark pits and caves which had
been dug under a few of the tents.
Meanwhile, men were dashing away from the encampment to
draw off the fire. They flung themselves into deep arroyos—dried-
up streambeds. Now the high-powered rifles of the militiamen
joined in and poured a hail of explosive bullets into the tents and
into the arroyos. This continued all through the morning and into
the afternoon, while men, women, and children huddled wherever
they had found shelter, without food or water. At 4:30 p.m. a train
from Trinidad brought more guards—and more machine guns.
Eyewitness Frank Didano reported, ‘‘The firing of the machine
guns was awful. They fired thousands and thousands of shots. There
were very few guns in the tent colony. Not over fifty, including shot-
guns. Women and children were afraid to crawl out of the shallow
pits under the tents. Several men were killed trying to get to them.

[ 36 ]
 The Colorado Coal Strike, 1913–14
The soldiers and mine guards tried to kill everybody; anything they
saw move, even a dog, they shot at.’’ Didano’s estimate of the num-
ber of guns in the colony may not have been accurate, but certainly
the miners’ weapons were no match for what was coming to them.
(All through the strike the operators had tried to spread the idea,
often abetted by the press, that the miners had stockpiled large
stores of ammunition and dynamite.)
That afternoon, the man the miners loved, Lou Tikas, was in the
big tent, caring for women and children and aiding the wounded,
when a telephone, its wires amazingly intact, started ringing. It was
Lieutenant Linderfelt, up on the hill. He wanted to see Tikas—
it was urgent. Tikas refused, hung up. The phone rang insistently
—again and again. Tikas reconsidered. Perhaps he could stop the
murder. He answered the phone. He would come.
Carrying a white flag, Tikas met Linderfelt on the hill. The lieu-
tenant was surrounded by militiamen. The two talked. Suddenly
Linderfelt, his face contorted with rage, raised his rifle and brought
the stock down with all his strength on Tikas’s skull. The rifle broke
in two as the strike leader fell to the ground.
Godfrey Irwin, a young electrical engineer visiting Colorado
with a friend, accidentally witnessed the scene from a nearby cliff.
He later described the next few moments for the New York World:
‘‘Tikas fell face downward. As he lay there, we saw the militiamen
fall back. Then they aimed their rifles and fired into the uncon-
scious man’s body. It was the first murder I had ever seen.’’
Two other strikers, unarmed and under guard, met their deaths
on the hill in a similar manner.
As the sun lowered gradually behind the black hills, soldiers
moved slowly down into the dark shadows alongside the tents. They
were drenching the canvas with coal oil. The tents caught fire in
rapid succession. Godfrey Irwin wrote,

We watched from our rock shelter while the militia dragged up their
machine guns and poured a murderous fire into the arroyos from a

[ 37 ]
 Howard Zinn
height by Water Tank Hill above the Ludlow depot. Then came the
firing of the tents. I am positive that by no possible chance could they
have been set ablaze accidentally. The militiamen were thick about the
northern corner of the colony where the fire started, and we could see
distinctly from our lofty observation place what looked like a blazing
torch waved in the midst of the militia a few seconds before the gen-
eral conflagration swept through the place.

While bullets whistled through the flaming canvas, people fled

in panic from their tents and from the caves beneath. A dispatch to
the New York Times read,

A seven-year-old girl dashed from under a blazing tent and heard the
scream of bullets about her ears. Insane from fright, she ran into a tent
again and fell into the hole with the remainder of her family to die with
them. The child is said to have been a daughter of Charles Costa, a
union leader at Aguilar, who perished with his wife and another
child. . . .
James Fyler, financial secretary of the Trinidad local . . . died with
a bullet in his forehead as he was attempting to rescue his wife from
the flames. . . . Mrs. Marcelina Pedragon, her skirt ablaze, carried her
youngest child from the flames, leaving two others behind.

And in another article the Times reported, ‘‘An unidentified

man, driving a horse attached to a light buggy, dashed from the
tents waving a white flag, just after the fire started. When ordered
to halt he opened fire with a revolver and was killed by a return vol-
ley from the militia.’’
The tents became crackling torches, and for hours the country-
side was aglow with a ghastly light while men, women, and chil-
dren roamed like animals in the hills, seeking their loved ones. At
8:30 p.m. the militia ‘‘captured’’ the smoldering pile of ashes that
now was Ludlow.

It was on the following day, April 21, that the bodies of the women
and children were found in the pit beneath the tent.
The New York Times headline read, ‘‘women and children

[ 38 ]
 The Colorado Coal Strike, 1913–14
roasted in pits of tent colony as flames destroy it. min-
ers store of ammunition and dynamite exploded, scat-
tering death and ruin.’’ It was clear that the tent colony had
been set aflame by the National Guard, but the paper was claiming,
as has so often happened, that it was the victims who were responsi-
ble for the disaster.
A seemingly endless stream of men and women filed past the
rows of coffins which filled the morgue in Trinidad. For Lou Tikas,
there was a separate funeral. Thousands stood in the streets and
wept. A few blocks from the morgue, in a windowless room in a
cheap boarding house, Mary Pedragon stared at the walls, her mind
gone. The two children she had not been able to carry had died in
the pit.
The Rocky Mountain News, heretofore a fairly conservative
newspaper, wrote,

Out of this infamy one fact stands clear. Machine guns did the mur-
der. . . . It was private war, with the wealth of the richest man in the
world behind the armed guards. The blood of the women and chil-
dren, burned and shot like rats, cries aloud from the ground. The great
state of Colorado has failed them. It has betrayed them. Her militia,
which should have been the impartial protectors of the peace, have
acted as murderous gunmen. . . . Explosive bullets have been used on
children. Does the bloodiest page in the French Revolution approach
this in hideousness?

The New York Times adopted a somewhat different approach. It

seemed to be angry, not so much at the horrible acts that had been
perpetrated during the massacre, but at the fact that the militia and
the authorities had been stupid enough to create a situation on
which the strikers might capitalize to their advantage. A Times edi-
torial read,

Somebody blundered. Worse than the order that sent the Light Bri-
gade into the jaws of death, worse in its effect than the Black Hole of
Calcutta, was the order that trained the machine guns of the state mili-

[ 39 ]
 Howard Zinn
tia of Colorado upon the strikers’ camp at Ludlow, burned its tents,
and suffocated to death the scores of women and children who had
taken refuge in the rifle pits and trenches. . . . Strike organizers cannot
escape full measure of blame for the labor war. . . . But no situation can
justify the acts of a militia that compels women and babes to lie in
ditches and cellars twenty four hours without food or water, exposes
them to cannon and rifle fire, and lets them die like trapped animals in
the flames of their camp. . . . [The workers] are now nerved to take this
citadel [the doctrine of the right to work] by storm. They used violence
against this doctrine. But when a sovereign State employs such horri-
ble means, what may not be expected from the anarchy that ensues?

Funerals continued in Trinidad, and great memorial meetings.

Families of the victims spoke and wept, and demanded redress, and
the crowds wept with them.
Now a thousand miners turned from the coffins of the dead, took
up their guns, and set out together for the back country. They were
joined by union miners from a dozen neighboring camps, who left
wives and children behind and swarmed over the hills, carrying
arms and ammunition. They swept across the coal country, from
Dalagua to Rouse, leaving in their wake the ashes of burned tipples,
the rubble of dynamited mines, and the corpses of strikebreakers
and militiamen.
Now, with the miners taking up arms against the militia, the
New York Times editorialized, ‘‘With the deadliest weapons of civi-
lization in the hands of savage-minded men, there can be no telling
to what lengths the war in Colorado will go unless it is quelled by
force. The President should turn his attention from Mexico long
enough to take stern measures in Colorado.’’

The Times was referring to increasing tensions between Mexico

and the United States, a situation that had been unfolding and came
to a crisis point on the day of the massacre at Ludlow.
After taking half of Mexican territory in the Mexican War of

[ 40 ]
 The Colorado Coal Strike, 1913–14
1846–48, the United States had remained strongly interested in the
internal affairs of that country, as American investments, especially
in Mexican oil, grew over the years. By 1913, these investments to-
taled a billion dollars, more than those of all other nations com-
bined. William Randolph Hearst, in addition to his interest in oil,
had inherited huge amounts of land in Mexico, and had become a
powerful voice for U.S. interference in Mexican politics to protect
these investments.
There was a new Mexican president in 1913, Victoriano Huerta,
who had deposed his populist predecessor, Francisco Madero, in
a bloody coup. President Woodrow Wilson refused to recognize
Huerta, which was attributed by some observers to Wilson’s abhor-
rence for dictatorship, by others to a desire for a more stable gov-
ernment that could preserve U.S. business interests. Wilson be-
came more and more aggressive towards Huerta, demanding his
resignation and allowing war materials to flow to Huerta’s political
opponents.
Wilson’s language was the language of idealism (‘‘Morality and
not expediency is the thing that must guide us’’) but his actions were
more in accord with the oil interests, one of whose spokesmen in
the Senate declared, ‘‘I think those hearing me will live to see the
Mexican border pushed to the Panama Canal.’’ As the tension grew
between Huerta and the United States, on April 9, 1914, the crew
of an American naval vessel loading supplies at the Mexican port of
Tampico was arrested, charged with violating martial law.
The sailors were released shortly, with an apology, but the com-
mander of the American fleet demanded a formal apology, punish-
ment of the responsible officer, and ‘‘that you publicly hoist the
American flag in a prominent position on shore and salute it with
twenty-one guns, which salute will be duly returned by this ship.’’
The Mexican foreign minister, Portillo y Rojas, announced that
Mexico would exchange salutes with the United States, and would
even salute first, but could not salute unconditionally. The officer

[ 41 ]
 Howard Zinn
who had arrested the American servicemen was under arrest, Rojas
said, and the Americans had been freed even before an investiga-
tion. ‘‘Mexico has yielded as much as her dignity will permit. Mex-
ico trusts to the fairmindedness and spirit of justice of the Ameri-
can people.’’
That trust turned out not to be justified. President Wilson de-
clared that unless the Mexican president acted before 6 p.m. on
Sunday, April 19, he would take the situation to Congress for fur-
ther action. Meanwhile, 22,000 men and fifty-two ships were ready.
It seemed that long before the Tampico incident, plans for interven-
tion in Mexico had been prepared. The Times reported, ‘‘cam-
paign worked out by naval experts in recent months
now being carried out in detail.’’
On April 20, Wilson sent a message to Congress asking for the
right to use armed force: ‘‘There can in what we do be no thought of
aggression or selfish aggrandizement. We seek to maintain the dig-
nity and authority of the United States only because we wish always
to keep our great influence unimpaired for the uses of liberty, both
in the United States, and wherever else it may be employed for the
benefit of mankind.’’
Wilson’s idealistic words were typical of his presidency. In the
next several years he would send American troops to occupy Haiti
and the Dominican Republic, again claiming it was for ‘‘the uses of
liberty . . . the benefit of mankind.’’ In fact, U.S. business interests
required stability in those countries, which could be guaranteed by
the presence of American marines.
The Times, in its editorial on the Mexican situation, said,

The President asked of Congress yesterday authority not to make war

upon Mexico in the full sense of the word, but to apply coercive pres-
sure to Huerta with intent to force his compliance with our just
demands.
Just as when we went to war with Spain there were those who in-
sisted that we should ignore the destruction of the Maine . . . so there

[ 42 ]
 The Colorado Coal Strike, 1913–14
are now those who hold that Huerta is in the right and that he has given
us no cause of offense. As to that, we may trust the just mind, the sound
judgment, and the peaceful temper of President Wilson.
There is not the slightest occasion for popular excitement over the
Mexican affair; there is no reason why anybody should get nervous
either about the stock market or about his business.

American naval guns then proceeded to bomb Vera Cruz, and

ten boatloads of marines landed. Over a hundred Mexicans were
killed, the press announced.
The feelings of one section of the population were clear. As the
Times reported, ‘‘The five hundred or more business men who at-
tended the luncheon of the Members Council of the Merchants As-
sociation of New York jumped to their feet yesterday when William
C. Breed, the toastmaster, called upon those present to express
their loyalty to President Wilson ‘to whatever course he shall deter-
mine necessary to restore peace, order, and a stable government in
the Republic of Mexico.’ ’’
But the miners of Colorado, with their nation facing such a criti-
cal question, with National Guardsmen needed to patrol the bor-
ders of Mexico, took a dim view of the ‘‘police action’’ and of the
calls upon their ‘‘patriotism.’’ They were influenced in this by two
factors: the horror they had just been through, inflicted upon them
not by any foreign tyranny but by the private business interests and
armed forces of their own government; and the ideology of the radi-
cal and antiwar movements in the United States.
Here was the radical viewpoint toward the Mexican situation,
expressed in the socialist press and at meetings throughout the
country: the United States had gone into Mexico to protect Rocke-
feller’s oil and William Randolph Hearst’s ranches: ‘‘The wars in
Mexico and Colorado are both Standard Oil wars’’ (International
Socialist Review, June 1914). We have no country, radicals said—
all workers are our countrymen—the only foreigner is the capital-
ist. In this view, the former Mexican president, Porfirio Diaz, had

[ 43 ]
 Howard Zinn
favored British oil interests rather than Rockefeller’s, Francisco
Madero had been used by Rockefeller to regain control of Mexico’s
oil, and Wilson was a puppet of Rockefeller.
The Women’s Peace Association in Denver said, ‘‘While Colo-
rado is disgracing herself in the eyes of the world, the man who is
responsible for the disgrace sits in his office in New York City. He is
John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’’ A meeting of women at Cooper Union in
New York denounced Rockefeller and condemned the landing of
troops at Vera Cruz. The New York executive committee of the So-
cialist Party asked Wilson to recall forces from Mexico and protect
the Colorado miners.
A week after the Ludlow Massacre, a Times editorial hit out at
two clergymen, the Reverend Percy Stickney Grant of Manhattan,
and the Reverend John Howard Melish of Brooklyn, who had de-
nounced from their pulpits the actions of the National Guard
against the strikers. The Times said, ‘‘These are sympathetic utter-
ances [the sermons of Grant and Melish] and differ from . . . cold
impartiality. . . . There are those who think that infamy in Colorado
consists in the fact that the militia are shooting workers. It may be
contended that there is something like infamy in the opposition of
workers to society and order. The militia are as impersonal and im-
partial as the law.’’
During this whole period, the New York Times published only
one letter to the editor concerning the strike. It should be taken
into consideration that any major event brings hundreds of letters
to the newspapers, and that the selection of these letters reflects, in
strong measure, editorial policy. This one letter was signed
‘‘W. C. C.’’ and declared that John D. Rockefeller Jr. ‘‘is doing a pa-
triotic duty. . . . He should have the approval of all who love justice
and true freedom.’’

On April 22, a ‘‘Call to Arms’’ went out from Denver, addressed to

‘‘the Unionists of Colorado.’’ The letter was signed by John Lawson,

[ 44 ]
 The Colorado Coal Strike, 1913–14
John McLennon, Ed Doyle, and several other U.M.W. officials, as
well as Ernest Mills, secretary-treasurer of the Western Federation
of Miners. It read,
Organize the men in your community in companies of volunteers to
protect the workers of Colorado against the murder and cremation of
men, women, and children by armed assassins in the employ of coal
corporations, serving under the guise of state militiamen. . . .
The state is furnishing no protection to us and we must protect
ourselves, our wives and children, from these murderous assassins.
We seek no quarrel with the state and we expect to break no law. We
intend to exercise our lawful right as citizens to defend our homes and
our constitutional rights.

Not until April 23 did the militia allow all the bodies to be re-
moved from the Ludlow ruins. It was reported that in Trinidad
‘‘men throng the streets about the union headquarters and demand
guns with which to work vengeances upon the militia, which they
hold responsible for the destruction of their homes and the death of
their women and children.’’
The press also reported fighting in an area of three square miles,
bordered on the west by Berwind and Hastings, on the east by the
Barnes station, on the north by the Ludlow tent colony, and on the
south by Rameyville. The battlefield was isolated by the cutting of
telephone and telegraph wires. The New York Times wrote, ‘‘men
from other union camps join fighters in hills to avenge
their slain: The militia . . . are preparing for a machine-gun sor-
tie. . . . On the surrounding hills, sheltered by rocks and boulders,
four hundred strikers await their coming, while their ranks are be-
ing swelled by grim-faced men who tramped overland in the dark,
carrying guns and ammunition from the neighboring union
camps.’’
The Trinidad Red Cross issued a statement that twenty-six bod-
ies of strikers had been found at Ludlow. There were conflicting re-
ports as to how many had been killed.

[ 45 ]
 Howard Zinn
Three hundred armed strikers marched from Fremont County
tent colonies to aid the embattled miners of southern Colorado.
Four train crews of the Colorado and Southern Railroad refused to
take soldiers and ammunition from Trinidad to Ludlow. This action
touched off talk of a general strike by the Brotherhood of Locomo-
tive Engineers and Trainmen and the Colorado State Federation
of Labor.
From coast to coast, people responded to the appeal of the Colo-
rado miners. Hundreds of mass meetings were held. Thousands of
dollars were sent for arms and ammunition. Conservative unions as
far away as Philadelphia took action.
While various groups called for federal intervention to restore
law and order, Rockefeller sent a telegram to Congress saying that
mining company officials were the ‘‘only ones competent to deal
with the questions.’’ A telegram to President Wilson from twenty
‘‘independent’’ coal operators in Colorado declared that ‘‘we heart-
ily endorse’’ the Colorado Fuel & Iron position. Meanwhile, John P.
White, president of the United Mine Workers, maintained that the
strike was a just one.
Near Aguilar, the Empire mine was besieged, the tipple burned,
the mouth of the slope caved in by dynamite explosions. Governor
Ammons reported an attack on Delagua and Hastings by miners,
and Trinidad’s mayor and Chamber of Commerce appealed to Pres-
ident Wilson for aid. An attack on the Berwind mine was expected
momentarily.
Two hundred militia and company guards along the tracks at
Ludlow were cut off from the rest of the district, according to the
Times, by ‘‘armed bands of strikers whose ranks are swelled con-
stantly by men who swarm over the hills from all directions.’’ Three
mine guards were reported dead at Aguilar and two mine shafts
were in ashes. The press reported that ‘‘the hills in every direction
seem suddenly to be alive with men.’’
At Colorado Springs, three hundred union miners quit work to
go to the Trinidad district, carrying revolvers, rifles, and shotguns.

[ 46 ]
 The Colorado Coal Strike, 1913–14
The union charged that the National Guard was exploding dyna-
mite in the holes under the tents at Ludlow, to destroy evidence of
further loss of life. As for Congress, a headline read, ‘‘senate and
house members express views but take no action.’’
A dispatch from Pueblo reported the first legal action. A federal
grand jury had returned indictments against eight striking miners
on charges of attacking the company post office at Higgins, Col-
orado.
As a troop train was readied to leave Denver to carry soldiers to
the strike zone, the eighty-two men of Company C mutinied and
refused to go to the district. According to the New York Times, ‘‘The
men declared they would not engage in the shooting of women and
children. They hissed the 350 men who did start and shouted im-
precations at them.’’
A million dollars in damage had reportedly been done in the first
two days of the fighting, and the newspapers followed the story
closely. A Denver reporter wrote, ‘‘Interest today centered in the
progress of the troop train sent from Denver to the Ludlow district.
One thousand armed strikers met last night to halt the progress of
the train.’’
On April 27, 1914, headlines in the Times read, ‘‘wilson to
send federal troops to colorado. ammons called trai-
tor. great mass meeting of denver citizens denounce
him and lieutenant governor fitzgerald. assail rocke-
feller jr. men and women weep as blanche bates’ hus-
band reads resolution. strikers capture chandler af-
ter two day battle.’’ The press reported that there was great
difficulty getting federal troops because all nearby military posts
had been stripped to provide a patrol along the Mexican border.
At the Denver meeting, a crowd of five thousand men and
women stood in the pouring rain on the lawn in front of the capital.
George Creel, former police commissioner of Denver, read the
resolution, asking that Major Hamrock, Lieutenant Linderfelt, and
other National Guard officers be tried for murder, and that the state

[ 47 ]
 Howard Zinn
seize the mines and operate them. They branded the governor and
lieutenant governor of Colorado as ‘‘traitors to the people and ac-
cessories to the murder of babies at Ludlow.’’
While that meeting was in progress, the Denver Cigar Makers
Union voted to send five hundred armed men to Ludlow and Trini-
dad in the morning. The women of the Denver United Garment
Workers Union announced that four hundred of their members had
volunteered as nurses to aid the Colorado strikers.
Governor Ammons acted. He appointed a special board of offi-
cers, consisting of Major Edward J. Boughton and two infantry cap-
tains, to report on the massacre. The Boughton Report concluded
that the National Guard was friendly to the strikers, except for
Company B, headed by Linderfelt. The report blamed Linderfelt
for being ‘‘tactless.’’ Upon the withdrawal of the National Guard
troops from the field, one unit had to remain behind, it stated, and
Company B had been selected ‘‘because, although hated by the
strikers, it was feared and respected by them.’’
‘‘The tent colony population is almost wholly foreign and with-
out conception of our government,’’ said the report. ‘‘A large per-
centage are unassimilable aliens to whom liberty means license. . . .
Rabid agitators had assured these people that when the soldiers left
they were at liberty to take for their own, and by force of arms, the
coal mines of their former employers. . . . They prepared for battle.’’
The Boughton Report found the coal operators only remotely
responsible, for having ‘‘established in an American industrial com-
munity a numerous class of ignorant, lawless, and savage South-
European peasants.’’ But the immediate cause of the violence was
seen as the action of Greek strikers in attacking the militia: ‘‘The
Greeks were the leaders. . . . The conflict was deliberately planned
by some of the strikers.’’
The report recommended that a general court martial should
try all officers and men who had mistreated, killed, burned, or
looted; that a permanent constabulary should be set up to curb ‘‘fe-
rocious foreigners’’; that all ‘‘instigators’’ should be apprehended

[ 48 ]
 The Colorado Coal Strike, 1913–14
and punished; and that the reestablishment of the Ludlow tent col-
ony be forbidden.
The left wing of the American labor movement made its con-
trasting sentiments very clear. Eugene Debs wrote in the Interna-
tional Socialist Review, ‘‘Like the shot at Lexington on April 20 in
another year, the shots fired at Ludlow were heard around the
world. . . . It is more historic than Lexington and . . . will prove, as
we believe, the signal for the American industrial revolution.’’ An-
other article by Debs called for a Gunmen Defense Fund, with ‘‘the
latest high power rifles, the same ones used by the corporation gun-
men, and 500 rounds of cartridges. In addition to this, every district
should purchase and equip and man enough Gatling and machine
guns to match the equipment of Rockefeller’s private army of assas-
sins. This suggestion is made advisedly, and I hold myself responsi-
ble for every word of it.’’ Mother Jones told a House of Representa-
tives committee, ‘‘The laboring man is tired of working to build up
millions so that millionaires’ wives may wear diamonds.’’
With the National Guard in Colorado unable to control the
mounting waves of violence, damages mounting to many millions
of dollars, and over twenty killed since the massacre, Governor Am-
mons requested that President Wilson send in federal troops.
According to Upton Sinclair (who sometimes exaggerated), on
the day the federal troops were sent, the miners had dynamite un-
der all the railroad tracks into Trinidad, ready to blow them up, two
million rounds of ammunition at a piano warehouse, and fifteen
hundred men in a neighboring state, armed and pledged to march
over the mountains.
On April 29 President Wilson proclaimed, ‘‘Whereas it is pro-
vided by the Constitution of the United States (that the U.S. shall
protect states, upon application against domestic violence) . . . now,
therefore, I warn all persons . . . to disperse and retire peaceably to
their respective abodes on or before the 30th day of April, instant.’’
Secretary of War Garrison asked all parties to surrender their
arms. The commander of the federal troops prohibited the import

[ 49 ]
 Howard Zinn
of strikebreakers from other states, prohibited picketing, and pro-
tected scabs.
Finally, the fighting ended.

President Wilson appointed a committee to mediate peace, which

then drew up a series of proposals. The union accepted. The opera-
tors refused. The committee ended its work.
The House Mines and Mining subcommittee assembled to in-
vestigate the strike called John D. Rockefeller to testify shortly
afterward. Rockefeller was now the object of both sharp attack
and vigorous defense. He told the committee he had not visited
Colorado for ten years or attended Colorado Fuel & Iron directors’
meetings during that period. He said he had not the ‘‘slightest idea’’
of wages or conditions in the mines.
However, according to the report of the Commission on Indus-
trial Relations, Rockefeller had ‘‘followed, step by step, the struggle
of his executive officials to retain arbitrary power, and to prevent
the installation of machinery for collective bargaining, by which
abuses might automatically be corrected, and he supported and en-
couraged this struggle in every letter he wrote to his agents.’’ (The
Commission on Industrial Relations had been set up in 1912 by the
Senate at President Wilson’s request to find a solution for increasing
capital-labor conflict. It was headed by a former labor attorney
named Frank Walsh, and later held hearings on the Colorado coal
strike.)
Rockefeller told the House committee that the strike had cost
Colorado Fuel & Iron over a million dollars but that ‘‘we stand ready
to lose every cent to defend the workers’ right to work.’’ A member
of the committee asked, ‘‘You’ll do that, even if you lose all your
money, and have all your employees killed?’’ Rockefeller answered,
‘‘It’s a great principle. It’s a national issue.’’
Another version of this statement, reported by John Reed, who
came up from his travels with the revolutionary Pancho Villa’s
forces in Mexico to cover the story of the massacre and wrote sev-

[ 50 ]
 The Colorado Coal Strike, 1913–14
eral eloquent articles for the Metropolitan Magazine, Rockefeller
said, ‘‘We would rather that the unfortunate conditions continue,
and that we should lose all the millions invested, than that the
American workmen should be deprived of their right, under the
Constitution, to work for whom they please. That is the great princi-
ple at stake.’’
But Rockefeller was clearly disturbed by the bad name he was
getting throughout the country. Picketers, including the novelist
Upton Sinclair, had marched outside his New York offices at 26
Broadway, near the churches where Rockefeller worshipped, and
around Rockefeller’s Tarrytown estate.
Deciding he needed to change the public perception of him as
being responsible for the brutal murders in Colorado, he hired Ivy
Lee, who had been recommended to him as ‘‘the father of public re-
lations in the United States.’’ Lee, who had worked for the Pennsyl-
vania Railroad to make the high rates it was charging palatable to
the public, described his work as ‘‘the art of getting believed in.’’
Rockefeller hired Lee for $1,000 a month, and Lee put out a se-
ries of tracts labeled ‘‘Facts Concerning the Struggle in Colorado
for Industrial Freedom,’’ but his ‘‘facts’’ were all designed to portray
the miners in the most ugly light, and included questioning the per-
sonal morals of Mother Jones. Radical publications referred to Lee
as ‘‘Poison Ivy.’’
Rockefeller considered himself an enlightened man, devoted to
Christian principles. In 1913 he had founded the Bureau of Social
Hygiene, dedicated to study and cure the evil of prostitution. He
had read a good deal, even Karl Marx’s Capital. ‘‘And yet,’’ writes
Zeese Papanikolas, biographer of Lou Tikas, ‘‘what reading he did,
his study, only had the effect of broadening the prejudices he had
begun with, after all.’’

In the seven months after the Ludlow Massacre, the air was filled
with talk of negotiations, peace offers, mediation plans. Rockefeller
got together with Mackenzie King of Canada, a politician experi-

[ 51 ]
 Howard Zinn
enced in labor disputes, and later to become prime minister of Can-
ada. What emerged was the Rockefeller Industrial Representation
Plan, a substitute for unionism whereby workers would select rep-
resentatives to discuss problems with management—in effect, a
company union.
The talks continued, the hearings went on. Testimony totaling
5,500 pages was heard by the Industrial Relations Commission and
the House Mines and Mining subcommittee while federal troops
patrolled the strike area.
Based on the report of the investigating committee set up under
Major Boughton by order of Governor Ammons, a military court
held a series of court-martials of militiamen accused of crimes.
They hurried through the trial of ten enlisted men, acquitting them
all, then came to Lieutenant Karl Linderfelt. Linderfelt admitted
clubbing Lou Tikas with a rifle, admitted this was unsoldierly, but
said that ‘‘any man who curses me has got the same thing coming.’’
There was testimony that the rifle stock that broke over Tikas’ head
had been weak. The court martial found Linderfelt guilty of as-
saulting Tikas with a Springfield rifle, ‘‘but attaches no criminality
thereto. And the court does therefore acquit him.’’
With the guardsmen exonerated, the authorities could now deal
with the strikers. In May of 1914, John R. Lawson, the leader of the
strike, was tried for murder. Judge Granby Hillyer, before whom he
was tried, was appointed by the governor after serving as attorney
for Colorado Fuel & Iron and assisting in the preparation of other
cases against the strikers. The panel from which the jury was cho-
sen was selected by the sheriff of Las Animas County. Lawson was
accused of murdering John Nimmo, one of the army of deputies
paid by the mining companies and appointed by the sheriff. No ef-
fort was made to prove that Lawson fired the fatal shot; he was to be
held responsible because he led the strike and was at the Ludlow
tent colony on the day of the battle. Sheriff Jefferson Farr of Huer-
fano County testified that for all he knew, the deputies might have
been the murderers. Lawson was convicted.

[ 52 ]
 The Colorado Coal Strike, 1913–14
The Commission on Industrial Relations, consistently friendly
to the miners, called his conviction ‘‘anarchism for profits and re-
venge, [which] menaces the security and integrity of American in-
stitutions as they seldom have been menaced before.’’ Lawson’s
conviction was eventually overturned.
On December 10, 1914, a special United Mine Workers conven-
tion at Denver called off the strike. The union had not won recogni-
tion. Sixty-six men, women, and children had been killed. Not one
militiaman or mine guard had been convicted of a crime. The fol-
lowing month, Mother Jones told a crowd in Cooper Union that the
union had ‘‘had only the Constitution. The other side had the bayo-
nets. In the end, bayonets always win.’’
The final report of the subcommittee of the House Mines and
Mining Committee was printed in 1915. The committee had been
asked to determine whether peonage existed in the coalfields;
whether postal facilities had been violated; whether immigration
laws had been broken; whether citizens had been arrested, tried, or
convicted in violation of the Constitution or the laws of the United
States; whether interstate commerce had been interfered with. The
conclusion of the committee was that, ‘‘if any federal law can be
enacted to stop such industrial disturbances, Congress should
act.’’ No specific law was suggested. The separate views of several of
the subcommittee members were added. Congressman James F.
Byrnes, of South Carolina, later to be secretary of state and adviser
to President Harry Truman in the dropping of the bomb on Hiro-
shima, declared that no federal laws had been violated and there-
fore nothing could be done.
Of the Rockefeller–Mackenzie King plan, Samuel Yellen, who
chronicled the strike in his book American Labor Struggles (1936),
wrote, ‘‘This plan . . . was the only fruit won by the coal miners of
southern Colorado after their long and bloody struggle.’’ This was a
superficial estimate. The strike and the Ludlow Massacre had af-
fected the consciousness of millions of Americans in a way that
could not be easily measured.

[ 53 ]
 Howard Zinn
Little by little, news dispatches about the Colorado strike and its
aftermath grew less numerous, until they disappeared altogether.
After World War I, a brief strike at the Colorado Fuel & Iron mines
was won by the I.W.W., but the union petered away. In 1928, vio-
lence flared again in another strike. The United Mine Workers
came back, this time for good.
In the thirties, came the rise of the C.I.O. (Congress of Indus-
trial Organizations) and a new wave of militant trade unionism.
Woody Guthrie was moved to write a song, which he entitled
‘‘The Ludlow Massacre.’’ Here are two of its eleven stanzas:

You struck a match and the blaze it started.

You pulled the triggers of your gatling guns.
I made a run for the children but the fire wall stopped me.
Thirteen children died from your guns. . . .

We took some cement and walled that cave up

Where you killed those thirteen children inside.
I said, ‘‘God bless the Mine Workers’ Union,’’
And then I hung my head and cried.

Today, on an isolated patch of desert in southern Colorado, in

the shadow of the black hills, stands a monument erected by the
United Mine Workers on the spot where the death pit of the Ludlow
Massacre existed. The monument lists the names of the individuals
found in the pit and declares its dedication ‘‘to those who gave their
lives for freedom at Ludlow.’’

Cedelina Costa Eulala Valdez

Lucy Costa Rudolph Valdez
Carlo Costa Frank Petrucci
Onafrio Costa Joe Petrucci
Parria Valdez Lucy Petrucci
Elvira Valdez Cloriva Pedragon
Mary Valdez

[ 54 ]
 The Colorado Coal Strike, 1913–14
The strike in Colorado, like so many struggles of people through
the ages, has often been seen as a defeat for the workers. Certainly
it was, at the time. But for those who came to know of the event—
mostly outside the classroom—in the decades since the Ludlow
Massacre, the story has been educational and inspiring.
We learn something about the symbiotic relationship between
giant corporations and government. We learn about the selective
control of violence, where the authorities deal one way with the vio-
lence of workers and another way with the violence of police and
militia. We learn about the role of the mainstream press. At the
same time, we are inspired by those ordinary men and women who
persist, with extraordinary courage, in their resistance to over-
whelming power. It is a story that continues in our time.

[ 55 ]
This page intentionally left blank
 DANA FR ANK
~~~~~
girl strikers occupy
chain store, win big:
The Detroit Woolworth’s Strike
of 1937
This page intentionally left blank
on the surface it seemed like the most ordinary of Saturdays at
the most ordinary of American institutions. It was February 27,
1937, at Woolworth’s Five and Dime store, the big four-story red
brick one in downtown Detroit, at the corner of Grand River and
Woodward Avenue. Like all Woolworth’s stores, this one was
painted with red and green trim, with the chain’s name out front in
big gold letters. Throughout that morning cabs and buses, Chrysl-
ers and Plymouths slid back and forth along the avenue. Shoppers
rustled by or paused for a brief chat with friends.
Inside, Woolworth’s opened up like a palace, with fluted col-
umns, embossed tin ceiling tiles, hanging bulbous art nouveau
lamps, and, best of all, a vast array of small, low-priced goods: hair
combs, knitting needles, lampshades, safety pins, pie plates, face
creams, and crisp new shoelaces folded into little packets with pa-
per bands around their middles specifying their length. Most won-
derfully, Woolworth’s was a palace built for working-class people.
The big fluted columns were made of concrete, not marble, then
painted shiny bright colors. Tidily printed signs poked up from dis-
plays throughout the store to reassure customers that almost all the
goods splayed out in flat, tray-like counters at waist level cost only

[ 59 ]
 Dana Frank
five or ten cents, just as the store’s name promised. Bins of tilted
glass along one side held back masses of eminently affordable jelly
beans, peanut clusters, and old-fashioned mystery candies with
names of obscure origin like ‘‘bridge mix’’ or ‘‘nonpareils’’ (the little
chocolate mounds with white sprinkles embedded in their tops that
survive today in the equally obscure realm of movie theater candy).
Unlike its Costco and Price Club heirs, Woolworth’s promised
not a cavernous warehouse of cardboard boxes in monster sizes, but
a maze of small nooks and crannies, up and down stairs, waiting to
be discovered. Shoppers in downtown Detroit that Saturday could
weave upward to the second floor on wide wooden stairs with a
brass railing down their middle, pause on the landing at a glass dis-
play full of woven pastel Easter baskets and Peter Rabbits (it was
three weeks before Easter) and pass upward to a ‘‘complete line of
knitting and crotcheting’’ with ‘‘free instruction,’’ and to the de-
lights of the notions and dry goods departments. The more intrepid
could follow arrows luring them down into the basement sales level,
complete with canaries. There, shoppers who were white could in-
dulge in a banana split at the lunch counter.
The hundred and fifty or so young women working at Wool-
worth’s on this particular morning seemed like the most ordinary
of young working-class ladies. Sandwiched behind the displays,
gracefully sidestepping piles of boxes kept out of the customers’
sight, the clerks flashed smiles, made change, or cheerfully intro-
duced the latest lipstick. The ones who worked in the candy depart-
ment and at the lunch counter wore little white short-sleeved uni-
forms with colored cuffs and collars and matching plastic buttons.
The salesclerks, by contrast, were wearing surprisingly dressy out-
fits in somber colors—long, sleek, fitted skirts and knitted tops with
short jackets or wide lace collars. Most wore heels, though not the
waitresses, who had on the 1930s version of sensible shoes. Almost
every single one of the women had the exact same hairdo: cut just a
bit below her chin, parted on the side, and curving down in care-
fully constructed waves around her face.

[ 60 ]
 Girl Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big
Suddenly, at exactly 11:00 a.m., at the height of the Saturday
shopping rush, Floyd Loew, an organizer for the Waiters’ and Wait-
resses’ Union of Detroit, strode to the very center of the store’s first
floor. Without warning he blew a screeching whistle as loud as
he could and yelled, ‘‘STRIKE! STRIKE!’’ (by some reports,
‘‘STRIKE, girls, STRIKE!’’).
Voices shouted out and cheers rose from different parts of the
store. First the women in the white uniforms at the food counter
stopped working. Then they moved quickly through the whole
store, and soon almost all the women workers on all three sales
floors had stepped back from their counters or rushed out from the
kitchen, folded their arms, and stopped working, clearly in accor-
dance with a tightly coordinated plan.
‘‘Behind the counters, the girls appeared ready for the call,’’ re-
ported the Detroit News. ‘‘The jangle of cash registers stopped, and
bewildered customers found themselves holding out nickels and
dimes in vain.’’ A small number of women, maybe ten or fifteen,
kept working for a while, and seem to have slipped quietly out of the
store in the chaos that followed. One news report alleged that Floyd
Loew, the union organizer, yelled out, ‘‘Sock any of those girls who
don’t stop working.’’ But ‘‘there was no trouble,’’ said the Detroit
Times. ‘‘Not a girl tried to wait on a customer.’’
A floor supervisor rushed off to find the store’s manager, William
F. Mayer. Within minutes, Mayer and all the women, plus assorted
stock boys, department heads, and managers, along with Loew and
other organizers from the waiters’ and waitresses’ union, had
crammed into a conference room on the third floor. The strikers
presented Mayer with an explicit set of demands: they would refuse
to work and would occupy the store night and day until Woolworth’s
granted them union recognition, a ten-cent an hour raise (they
were making around twenty-five cents an hour), an eight-hour
workday, time and a half for overtime after forty-eight hours a week,
fifty-cent lunches for the soda fountain workers, free uniforms and
free laundering of them, seniority rights, hiring of new workers

[ 61 ]
 Dana Frank
only through the union offices, and no discrimination against the
strikers after they returned to work.
Mayer hurriedly tried to ‘‘sweettalk’’ the women into returning
to work. He promised he’d do everything he could to address their
concerns on Monday—if only they’d all, please, please, go back to
work.
‘‘Alright girls, give him your answer,’’ shouted Loew. ‘‘NO!’’ they
roared. And there was no turning back.
A hundred and eight ordinary young women had done a huge,
astonishing thing: they were not only on strike, right in the depths
of the Great Depression, but they were occupying the property of
one of the largest transnational companies in the United States and
refusing to leave until they won. It was a classic sit-down strike, but
for the first time the strikers were all women working in a variety
store, not men in a factory. Within hours the eyes of the nation
would be riveted on these young women and their strike. They had,
after all, taken on one of the biggest corporate and consumer icons
of the century, with two thousand stores in five countries—it was
like striking Wal-Mart, the Gap, and McDonald’s all at the same
time.
These young women believed that they just might win because
they were living in an extraordinary moment in history, in the exact
geographic epicenter of the labor uprisings of the Great Depres-
sion. At that very moment union activists were breaking out of the
straightjacket of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) to give
birth to the militant Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). In
a mass uprising of almost four million working people in the late
1930s and early 1940s, young people were on the move; the Left
was thriving; new tactics of canny strategy and direct action, espe-
cially the sit-down strike, were suddenly deployed with both daring
and shocking success. It wasn’t exactly a revolution, but something
huge was happening in early 1937.
And from February 27 to March 5, the Woolworth strikers were

[ 62 ]
 Girl Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big
at center stage. Newsreel teams, radio personalities, and reporters
from the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and Life magazine
rushed to Detroit to cover the story. As the press well knew, the
salesclerks and waitresses at Woolworth’s had set something huge in
motion that would have ripple effects in the labor movement, in
popular culture, and in the lives of everyone involved for decades to
come. No question, these strikers had taken on Goliath. It was both
thrilling and terrifying—and the consequences were utterly
uncertain.

chain store menace growing

Today if we think of Woolworth’s, we either recall the battles
to desegregate its lunchrooms in the early 1960s or evoke a roman-
tic image of small-town life gone by, paved under by the consoli-
dating forces of modern consumer capitalism. But in the 1930s
Woolworth’s was itself the modernizer, bulldozing down an earlier
generation of small merchants and offering shoppers not the old-
fashioned but the new and stylish. In the process it spat out enor-
mous profits for its owners. By the mid-1930s, though, the public
was beginning to get clear about where those profits came from—
and at what price.
Frank W. Woolworth, the firm’s president until his death in
1919, opened his first store in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1879.
Woolworth figured out that he could draw in masses of working-
class shoppers and make hefty profits by offering an entire store full
of ultra-cheap goods, none of them priced at more than five or ten
cents, hence the new name ‘‘five and dime.’’ Within a few years
Woolworth had opened seven stores in upstate New York and Penn-
sylvania; by 1905 he had a hundred and twenty stores all over the
country; by 1937 he had over two thousand. Woolworth’s immedi-
ately leapt across national borders. Between 1897 and 1900 alone
the company opened fifty-nine stores in Canada. By 1913, Frank
Woolworth had come of age as a famous magnate, big enough to

[ 63 ]
 Dana Frank
erect his own monument, the Woolworth Building, a sixty-story
neo-gothic tower at the corner of Broadway and Park Place in New
York City.
In part, Frank Woolworth’s secret was all those inexpensive, use-
ful objects—the safety pins, shoelaces, and pie plates. But he had
also figured out that people would buy all sorts of other ‘‘novelty
goods,’’ another now old-fashioned concept that was innovative in
its time. He sold millions of holiday decorations, for example, like
the Easter bunnies on display in Detroit at the end of February in
1937, or glass ornaments for Christmas trees and funny green hats
for St. Patrick’s Day. His stores also catered to fads. Whatever hair
clip happened to be in fashion that month, he stocked by the mil-
lions. And Woolworth also figured out there was money to be made
off children, especially by selling candy; in 1917 alone the chain
sold ninety million pounds. Woolworth’s also established its famous
segregated lunch counters, selling banana splits for pennies. Over-
all, even if the profit was miniscule on each nonpareil or chocolate
sundae, the volume of total sales added up quickly. In 1935 Wool-
worth’s produced a profit of $31,247,000.
Frank Woolworth also pioneered in the structural elements that
could make economies of scale lucrative. He introduced a central-
ized, pooled ordering system, regional warehouses, and regular
buying forays to Europe. In the process his company developed
enormous power over its suppliers, as it began to skip past the
wholesalers to buy directly from manufacturers—just as Wal-Mart
and its rivals do today. ‘‘The syndicate would absorb a factory’s en-
tire output under the terms of year-long contracts,’’ notes James
Brough in his study of the Woolworth family. ‘‘Frank dictated the
terms to those manufacturers; the price of their security was sub-
servience.’’ With large markets assured, the suppliers could save by
avoiding credit costs and buying raw materials in bulk. But Mr.
Woolworth called the shots on price, quality, shipment dates, and
future contracts.

[ 64 ]
 Girl Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big
Woolworth’s goods were also cheap because Frank and his min-
ions became adept at sniffing out the products of sweated labor. In
one account of a buying trip, Woolworth told of visiting a poor
mountain village in Germany where impoverished women and
children labored night and day, heads bent, making little wax dolls
and Christmas tree ornaments. Ah, Mr. Woolworth lamented, they
were so oppressed. He immediately placed a big order.
At the time of the Detroit strike, the Woolworth Corporation
was a powerful presence all over North America and across the At-
lantic. That year Woolworth’s owned 2010 stores in the United
States, Canada, and Cuba, plus 737 stores in Britain and 82 in Ger-
many.
But just as the company grew and grew, a broad social move-
ment mushroomed with equal energy in the late 1920s and 1930s,
dedicated to stopping the spread of chain stores like Woolworth’s.
By 1928, organizations dedicated to eradicating what they called
the chain store evil were thriving in over four hundred communi-
ties across the United States. Almost entirely lost to historical mem-
ory, the movement expanded throughout the early and mid-1930s
and reached its peak at almost the exact same moment as the De-
troit strike in 1937.
Critics pointed out that stores like Woolworth’s had been
marching across the national landscape at an ever-increasing pace
since the 1920s. The chains’ share of total retail sales grew from 4
percent in 1919 to 20 percent in 1929 and was still expanding. The
A&P grocery chain alone owned 15,000 stores by 1929; chain gro-
ceries altogether accounted for over 39 percent of all grocery sales
in the country that year. Drugstores, cigar stores, shoe stores—in
all these fields, chains were rapidly pushing aside locally owned
businesses and independent merchants. In the variety store market
Woolworth’s dominated, well ahead of its closest rival, S. S. Kresge,
with 1,881 stores in 1930 to Kresge’s 678.
Small merchants in particular charged that the chains were ‘‘a

[ 65 ]
 Dana Frank
menace to the community.’’ As a letter circulated in Indiana put it,
‘‘The chain stores are undermining the foundation of our entire lo-
cal happiness and prosperity. They have destroyed our home mar-
kets and merchants, paying a minimum to our local enterprises and
charity, sapping the life-blood of prosperous communities’’—sort
of like corporate vampires. Small merchants couldn’t compete with
the chains’ vast economies of scale, the critics charged, and as
smaller stores went under, jobs for owners and their trainees were
evaporating, leaving ‘‘a nation of clerks.’’ Wholesalers were also be-
ing squeezed out by the growing intimacy between chain stores and
suppliers, and they too jumped into the fray. By the mid-1930s the
movement against chain stores had become extremely popular. A
poll in August of 1936 found that 69 percent of Americans believed
the chains were dangerous and should be suppressed.
In response, between 1934 and 1941 state legislators introduced
five hundred bills containing measures designed to curb the chains.
Most of the proposed laws imposed a hefty graduated tax that grew
steeper as the number of stores in the chain grew, and most were
quickly ruled unconstitutional, but thirty-two survived. In 1928, as
criticism mounted, Congress ordered the Federal Trade Commis-
sion to investigate the chains. Its report, issued in 1935, came out
pro-chain. But meanwhile the mere fact that the federal govern-
ment was investigating the chains confirmed popular concerns,
further legitimating the anti-chain movement. The movement’s
greatest triumph was the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936, an amend-
ment to the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914. Robinson-Patman ad-
dressed the supply end, making it illegal for manufacturers to offer
differential discounts to retail buyers based on the quantity of their
orders, if the effect would be ‘‘to lessen competition or tend to cre-
ate a monopoly.’’
By the mid-1930s the chains felt deeply threatened by all this ag-
itation—the proposed taxes alone would have cost them millions.
Woolworth’s, as one of the largest and most visible of these retail

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 Girl Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big
empires, would have felt especially vulnerable. Very quickly the
chains spent thousands on advertisements, lobbyists, and even a
clever little Debate Manual on the Chain Store Question that pur-
ported to offer tips for arguing both sides but always circled back
around to the dangers of regulation. By 1937, they had pushed back
their critics and stopped the anti-chain movement’s advance.
Woolworth’s public relations problem #1 had been successfully con-
tained for the time being, but its ghost would remain, hovering be-
hind the strike to come.

babs spends millions on new hubby

in orgy of spending
The company’s executives, though, could never contain their public
relations problem #2, Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton. Hutton
proved an eternal public relations migraine because she unmasked
one of the company’s dirty secrets: how much money was being
made and how offensively it was being spent. And when the Detroit
sit-down blasted across the nation’s headlines in 1937, Barbara Hut-
ton loomed larger than ever in the public imagination.
Barbara was Frank Woolworth’s granddaughter, born in 1912.
Her mother, Edna Woolworth, had married eternal playboy Frank-
lyn Hutton, brother to the famous broker E. F. Hutton. When Bar-
bara, their only child, was four, Edna killed herself with poison.
Barbara spent the next two years under the care of governesses,
wandering about in her grandfather’s mansion in New York. Then,
in 1919, her grandfather passed on to wherever chain store mag-
nates go, soon to be joined by his wife Jennie, and in 1924 the Wool-
worth fortune passed to their two surviving daughters plus little
Barbara, in three equal shares.
That left Barbara ‘‘the richest girl in the world,’’ as the press and
its readers dubbed her, riveted by the prospect of her vast future
wealth. For a time her father took an interest in her, but soon she
was old enough to be packed off to boarding school in the East.

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 Dana Frank
‘‘Babs’’ became a fixture in the media throughout the 1920s, the
proverbial pampered, unhappy, ultra-rich semi-orphan for whom
the phrase ‘‘poor little rich girl’’ was originally coined.
Then the Depression hit, and Barbara came of age. Her self-
indulgent persona blossomed, and everyone knew about it from
daily press reports. She was infatuated with spending money—on
jewels, on designer clothes, on cars, and especially on men. Out of
some vast romantic fantasy and who knows what deep-seated inse-
curities she had developed during her famously unhappy child-
hood, Hutton was fixated on marrying European royalty. In 1933,
five months before she turned twenty-one and could assume full
control over her estate, she married Count Alexis Mdivani (with
a nicely pretentious silent M), a Russian emigré gold digger with
a dubious claim to a Georgian title. The press went wild. At the ce-
lebrity wedding of the decade Barbara wore a diamond tiara, brace-
let, and pearls, altogether worth a million dollars (about twelve mil-
lion in 2000 dollars). She bought eighty outfits for her honeymoon,
seventy trunks for the servants to cart them around in, and for her
wedding night a nightgown that had been embroidered by two
dozen cloistered nuns.
Later that year Barbara came into full possession of her fortune,
an estimated $50 million (about $600 million in 2000 dollars). As
the press obsessively recounted her wealth over the next three
years, ‘‘Babs’’ kept up the show in escalating performances of
spending, traveling all over the world and throwing money around
with proverbial reckless abandon. By 1937 she had dumped her first
prince and married another, Count Kurt Haugwitz-Reventlow, this
one a minor member of the vestigial Danish landed nobility. That
year—the year of the Detroit strike—she bought jewelry worth $2
million, a Packard, a yellow convertible, two Rolls-Royces, a 157-
foot yacht, and a mansion-estate in London. The latter cost about
$4.5 million and featured two ten-car garages, a boathouse, stables,
tennis courts, two pools (one indoor, one outdoor), and, best of all, a

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 Girl Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big
bathroom made of $10,000 worth of marble, with sink and bathtub
handles of gold, shelves of crystal, and heated towel racks. She em-
ployed thirty-one servants to keep it all neat and tidy.
All this wealth, self-indulgence, and obliviousness would be ob-
scene in the best of times, but seven years into the Great Depres-
sion it was beyond appalling to most Americans. The Poor Little
Rich Girl became the Most Hated Girl in America. ‘‘There has al-
ways been something fantastic and a little useless and stupid about
Barbara Hutton,’’ wrote columnist Adela Rogers St. John in 1937.
Wherever Barbara went in the United States, cab drivers snubbed
her and doormen slammed doors in her face. And wherever she
went she carried the ‘‘Woolworth heiress’’ tag along with her. (Al-
though she had sold a large hunk of her domestic Woolworth stock
in 1930, she still owned part of the British subsidiary, and even if
invested elsewhere, the money had all come from grandpa Wool-
worth.) Much to the chagrin of the Woolworth executives of her
day, Barbara Hutton Mdivani Haugwitz-Reventlow’s crime was not
so much that she was rich, but that—unlike her aunts, for example,
who were every bit as wealthy—she failed to follow all the unspo-
ken rules of discretion by which the super-rich mask their wealth,
enjoy it behind closed doors, and represent themselves to the public
as tasteful and benevolent.

tired feet, say five and dime clerks

If Barbara Hutton focused public attention on Woolworth profits by
showing exactly where they went, she also highlighted where they
came from, because in the eyes of the press her antithesis was the
poor, exploited young woman who labored as a Woolworth’s clerk.
In 1933 Bing Crosby released the hit song that would entwine the
two in the public imagination for decades: ‘‘I Found a Million-
Dollar Baby in a Five-and-Ten-Cent Store.’’
Woolworth’s goods were so very cheap in part because the
people that sold them were paid the lowest possible wages. Frank

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 Dana Frank
Woolworth put his formula bluntly: ‘‘We must have cheap help or
we cannot sell cheap goods.’’ More precisely, he couldn’t make huge
profits and keep expanding if he couldn’t obtain inexpensive labor
to keep his profit margin up.
To keep its labor costs in the basement, Woolworth’s deliberately
deskilled its sales operation—that is, it made its clerks’ jobs as sim-
ple as possible. ‘‘The Woolworth chain takes the position that the
salesgirls are primarily wrapping and change-making machines
and they make little effort to pick for sales ability,’’ observed one in-
dustry analyst in 1928. Woolworth’s pioneered in placing its goods
out on display, easily accessible to the customer, who no longer had
to ask a clerk to fetch down a particularly enticing lampshade from
an upper shelf behind a counter. The company bet correctly that if
enough appealing objects were available at cheap enough prices,
the goods would sell themselves and Woolworth’s would save big
bucks on labor. ‘‘When a clerk gets so good she can get better wages
elsewhere let her go,’’ Frank Woolworth wrote as early as 1892, ‘‘for
it does not require skilled and expensive salesladies to sell our
goods.’’
Woolworth’s formula is the same one used by McDonald’s, Cir-
cuit City, and other big chains today. If the job is sufficiently de-
skilled, a huge potential labor pool opens up, and if turnover rates
are high, so much the better—managers can then pick and choose
the pliant, the eager, and the charming. By the 1930s, Woolworth’s
had developed labor policies that deliberately created a revolving
door of employment. Store managers were rotated from store to
store and encouraged to weed out employees regularly at each new
site. And since the mid-nineteenth century employers had used an-
other, accompanying trick: after deskilling the job, hire women—
especially young women—who had very few choices on the labor
market, who might see themselves working for pay only tempo-
rarily, and who, in theory, were less likely to unionize.
In 1937, Woolworth’s employed about sixty-two thousand peo-
ple in the United States, but never hired any African Americans. Or

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 Girl Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big
at least its managers didn’t think they did. Throughout the mid-
twentieth century, women of partial African descent passed as
white, often by posing as Italian or Spanish, to obtain relatively
good jobs as clerks in variety and department stores. However
much these jobs were dead-end, poorly paid, and exhausting, they
were a vast improvement over almost anything else available to
Black women, leading hundreds of women who passed as white to
endure the pain of hearing coworkers’ racist remarks day after day
in order to support their families.
Almost all the women who worked at Woolworth’s in 1937 were
very young. According to a national survey of Woolworth workers
in 1930, about half the store’s employees were sixteen, seventeen, or
eighteen years old, a quarter were between nineteen and twenty-
four, and only around 17 percent were twenty-five or older. Judging
by photos of the Detroit strike, though, a very few of the Detroit
workers were in their thirties or forties. Some, at the other end,
were fourteen or fifteen. Former Detroit Woolworth’s employee
Ceil McDougle, for example, remembers working at the chain in
1935 when she was only fifteen.
The women were overwhelmingly native born, and most were of
western or northern European descent, like McDougle, whose par-
ents were English and Scottish. Some of the clerks and waitresses at
Woolworth’s were married, but most were single women who lived
with their parents, turned their paychecks dutifully over to their el-
ders, and got a few dollars slipped back now and again for a new
dress or a pair of shoes.
Working at Woolworth’s could be grueling. Although some
worked only part-time or seasonally—Ceil McDougle worked only
at Christmas, Easter, and other holidays—most worked around
fifty hours every week, six days a week, and over a third regularly
put in more than fifty-four hours. That meant nine hours a day,
standing up. And that, in turn, meant very painful feet. ‘‘I don’t
know how the other girls stand it,’’ sympathized a New York Wool-
worth’s worker who had shelled out eight dollars for special shoes.

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 Dana Frank
‘‘They get flat feet and fallen arches and little surface varicose
veins.’’ State labor laws might dictate a stool for every woman to rest
on, but clerks at Woolworth’s in New York laughed at the idea of get-
ting to sit. ‘‘All the old girls know you can’t sit down, no matter how
slow it is and how tired you are.’’ When business lagged, the sales-
clerks had to look busy or they’d be confronted by floor managers
or fake shoppers lurking about to spy on them. If a waitress lacked
customers, she was expected to scrub the shelves or those big con-
crete columns—that was why the paint looked so shiny and bright
all the time.
Managers could be capricious or mean. As Ceil McDougle put it
politely, with an understated sigh, ‘‘Well, they didn’t have your in-
terests at heart.’’ Or, as a New York Woolworth’s employee put it in
1939, ‘‘The manager’s very grouchy. . . . If he says black is red, then
black is red.’’ Store managers tended to create a hierarchy of
women’s employment correlated with perceived beauty. The loveli-
est often got the better jobs as salesclerks, lunch counter waitresses
were one notch down, and kitchen helpers ranked lowest on the lad-
der of perceived attractiveness and concomitant income and work-
load. The clerks got $14.50, the waitresses $13.50 a week (plus the
latter had to pay for their uniforms and to have them laundered, al-
though they would have received some additional income from
tips). Lower-level managers, all male, also had their pets—workers
who they thought were cute, from whom they might obtain a sexual
favor, or who pleased them with a seemingly subservient manner.
All in all, by 1937 Woolworth’s had built a powerful engine of
wealth and poverty, a private empire that spread to Cuba and Ger-
many, into small-town life and into the daily lives of tens of thou-
sands of young women. But by the late 1930s the workings of that
engine were also becoming increasingly visible to the American
public. Woolworth’s might be a great place to buy pie plates or
Fourth of July bunting, but Barbara Hutton’s exploits were sick-
ening, the chains were being cast as an evil menace, and the woman

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 Girl Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big
behind the counter had a glazed, exhausted look in her eye—people
saw it. Soon enough, all those public perceptions would turn out to
be powerful weapons in the hands of the strikers.

autoworkers in big victory over general motors;

stay-ins spreading
Woolworth’s was a formidable opponent, but the women who
clerked at the Detroit Woolworth’s weren’t stupid in taking on such
an immense adversary. This was the 1930s, after all, and they were
sniffing the activist wind. In the middle of the Great Depression,
just when working people should have been feeling most vulnera-
ble, most powerless, most at the mercy of corporations, the tide of
labor activism rushed in and millions of ordinary working people
suddenly believed in their own power and unleashed it.
The Great Depression had hit hard and stayed hard. By 1933 one-
third of the country’s workforce was unemployed and another third
was underemployed, working part-time or in marginal jobs. Pro-
duction plummeted by two-thirds; bankruptcies rippled through
cities, schools, banks, and small businesses, tearing apart families.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, inaugurated in 1933, prom-
ised to close the economic abyss, but the first elements of his New
Deal, while they provided direct aid for the poor, did not yet ad-
dress structural changes in the economy.
The mere hint of federal support for the labor movement in the
National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, however, prompted a
wave of strikes and organizing drives in 1933 and 1934. Cotton pick-
ers in California, textile workers in the South, garment workers
in New York, waterfront workers in San Francisco, teamsters in
Minneapolis—all organized by the hundreds of thousands and
launched mass strikes, proving that working people were eager
to join unions and anything but passive in the face of economic
devastation.
But they had one big problem on their hands: the American

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 Dana Frank
Federation of Labor (AFL). After a decade of governmental repres-
sion following World War I, most of the labor unions that had re-
mained in the early 1930s AFL were narrow, largely interested in
skilled workers only, and spectacularly suspicious and conservative
in their attitude toward organizing new workers, especially women
or people of color, whom they mostly excluded. Most AFL unions
were obsessed with petty jurisdictional disputes over which union
had the right to represent which exact workers, depending on nar-
row skill categories. (The federation’s opponents called it the Amer-
ican Separation of Labor.)
Then, in 1935, Congress passed the National Labor Relations
Act, also known as the Wagner Act, to deliberately encourage
unionization and collective bargaining through a complex system of
supervised elections, negotiations, and, above all, protection of the
right to organize. The moment had come for labor to rise up. But
unless something could be done to crack open the AFL, nothing
would move, and progressive activists knew it.
Enter the CIO. In late 1935, leaders of several of the more mili-
tant unions in the AFL formed a new coalition, the Committee for
Industrial Organization, the original CIO. They quickly drew up
plans for a mass organizing drive that would embrace all workers in
broad, industry-by-industry unions, and started to pool their funds.
Deeply threatened by these militants and their energetic plans, the
AFL leadership suspended all of the CIO’s unions in late summer of
1936. Undaunted, the purgees formed their own new, independent
federation, changed its name to the Congress of Industrial Organi-
zations to keep their acronym the same, and the flood gates of orga-
nization finally opened up.
All through the fall of 1936—the fall before the Woolworth’s
strike—CIO organizers fanned out into industrial communities in
the Northeastern and Midwestern United States. The United Mine
Workers (UMW) alone, led by the famous John L. Lewis, donated
half a million dollars to build the Steel Workers’ Organizing Com-
mittee (SWOC). Within a few months, over a hundred thousand

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 Girl Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big
steelworkers in a hundred and fifty different towns had rushed to
join. Meanwhile, CIO organizers wove together a welter of small
auto workers’ unions into a new, unified body, the United Auto
Workers (UAW). Throughout that fall, UAW members led small,
sporadic strikes at parts plants and other factories in the upper Mid-
west, nothing huge, but December brought the first sign of what
was about to come: UAW workers who made brakes at the Kelsey-
Hayes plant in Detroit won a sit-down strike.
Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, the UAW took on General
Motors, the largest corporation in the world. On December 30,
1936, in Flint, Michigan—about seventy miles outside Detroit—
autoworkers staged a sit-down strike at the General Motors Fisher
Body plant. The Flint strike, in turn, forced the company to stop
production at other plants all over the country, idling 112,000 work-
ers. Riveted, the nation watched for six weeks as the strikers
camped out in the plant, the National Guard camped in the streets,
the governor refused to send soldiers into the buildings, and local
police and strikers battled it out with tear gas both inside and out-
side the plant. Finally, miraculously, on February 11, 1937, the
mighty General Motors capitulated to the pipsqueak United Auto
Workers and agreed to recognize the union and to negotiate wage
increases and better working conditions. The nation was stunned.
The greatest of corporations had been brought to its knees. Sud-
denly anything was possible.
For a few days local people absorbed the news. Then all hell
broke loose in Detroit. In the second week after the General Motors
settlement, four or five thousand working people at twenty or thirty
different workplaces throughout the city went on strike. Some just
walked out the old-fashioned way; others sat down. On Monday,
February 22, for example, three hundred auto body workers at
Briggs Manufacturing in Highland Park stopped work and occu-
pied their plant. On Tuesday, thirty men who drove liquor trucks
for the Star Transfer Lines struck and won their demands in a single
day. On Wednesday, three hundred women and a handful of men

[ 75 ]
 Dana Frank
who worked at the Ferry-Morse Seed company staged their own sit-
down strike, and at the Conant Factory Lunch, sixty high school
boys who delivered food to local factories sat down and after five
hours won a pay raise from $1.00 to $1.25 an hour. That very night
fifty-five charwomen who cleaned the Penobscot Building won a
raise in pay after a two-hour work stoppage of their own.
The strikes and victories went on and on. On Thursday the
Ferry-Morse Seed workers won their strike with a ten- to twenty-
five-cent an hour pay increase and a forty-hour work week. At the
Bon Dee Golf Ball Company, six workers sat down; workers at
the Splendid Laundry announced they’d won a pay increase. At
the Massachusetts Laundry, ‘‘300 girls sat down and demanded a
straight ten cents an hour increase.’’ Organizing worked.
Every day the women who worked at the downtown Detroit
Woolworth’s would have read about these events in the paper and
heard about them on their radios. Every day they would have heard
tales of daring actions from neighbors and friends, sisters and
brothers, boyfriends, fathers, and mothers. Every day they would
have had more time to think about the General Motors victory and
all the subsequent gains workers in Detroit were winning with their
strikes. And every day they would have wondered if they could do
it too.
On Saturday morning they all showed up at work, in their tidily
pressed uniforms and sleek dark skirts. They’d heard enough to
make up their minds.

management to woolworth strikers: drop dead

Saturday, February 27, 11:30 a.m. Upstairs, in that all-important
meeting, manager Frank Mayer had tried his sweet talk, but to no
avail; the women had shouted back no. Now they were out on strike
for real—they’d done it. But what came next?
First, and most urgently, they needed to secure the doors to
make sure none of their fellow workers defected. Mayer had already
rushed his own guards to the doors to keep new customers out.

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 Girl Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big
Quickly the strikers and their allies from the waiters’ union took
over the doors from management and seized store keys from other
employees—stock boys, waffling salesclerks—who remained.
Within minutes ‘‘a huge crowd . . . gathered at the Woodward Ave-
nue doors,’’ reported the Detroit Times, ‘‘but nobody was admitted.
Vigilant girl strikers guarded all doors.’’
That still left around two hundred ‘‘amazed’’ customers trapped
inside the store. A few fled out the door immediately, but it soon be-
came clear that most of them wanted to stay and watch the excite-
ment. ‘‘The management sought to get the public out, but the cus-
tomers wanted to remain and view a sit-down strike first hand,’’ said
the Detroit News. Woolworth’s shoppers, after all, were themselves
working-class men and women, conscious of the city’s sit-down
strikes of the previous weeks and perhaps quite sympathetic. Some
of them might even have known the strike was about to happen and
been in the store deliberately. Gradually, over the next hour, Mayer
and the other managers hustled them out, a handful at a time.
Inside, it wasn’t clear what would happen next. Curious faces
started to press against the glass out front, so Mira Komaroff, from
the waiters’ and waitresses’ union, organized a group of women to
lower all the blinds and cover the street-level windows with brown
wrapping paper from the store. Then they rolled out sheets of the
same paper over the counters, covering the merchandise as the
clerks always did at the end of the day.
From the very beginning, the occupiers started to enjoy them-
selves immensely—and that would prove a key to their power and
solidarity during the strike. According to the Detroit Free Press,
as the women left Mayer’s office, they ‘‘laughed and shouted and
paraded up and down the stairways in a noisy celebration.’’ They
mobbed the three pay phones at the back of the main floor to call
their relatives and warn them excitedly that they might be in the
store indefinitely, joking, ‘‘You better expect me when you see me.’’
One large group settled down in little clusters on the stairs; others
huddled at the counters and started playing checkers. Someone

[ 77 ]
 Dana Frank
pulled out a deck of cards decorated with polka dots and a pair of
little Scottie dogs on the back and started a game with three other
women at the lunch counter.
But what, exactly, was going on? Would they be in the store for
seven weeks, like the General Motors strikers in Flint? Or had they
just signed up for a three-hour tour, like most of the Detroit workers
who had staged quickie sit-downs the week before?
By noon the store was caught in a strangely suspended state: it
was filled with food, all set up for the lunch rush. But the strikers
carefully ‘‘kept away from the counters where food was spread out
ready for the luncheon crowd.’’ Instead, some of the women who’d
brought bag lunches began to share them around, offering sand-
wiches and celery sticks, laughingly peeling bananas and feeding
them to each other. At 1:30, Frank Mayer appeared at the top of
the stairs and boomed, ‘‘Go downstairs and have lunch. It’s on the
house.’’ The strikers cheered him and crowded to the counters,
‘‘where the piles of fruit and rows of pies disappeared quickly, add-
ing to the good natured tone of the strike.’’ Meanwhile the guards
persuaded the last few customers to slip out the door.
All that food produced a rush of good feeling toward Frank
Mayer. ‘‘To show their gratitude, they washed the dishes after-
ward,’’ the Detroit Free Press reported. At this point Vita Terrall,
the women’s leader throughout the strike and the only individual
striker the papers identified fully, began to speak directly to report-
ers. She was married, twenty-four years old, and worked at the
candy counter. Terrall told the press after lunch that ‘‘they all like[d]
Mayer and had ‘nothing against him’ ’’; the real battle, she said, was
against the regional Woolworth’s management in Cleveland. Floyd
Loew, the organizer, had made the same argument to the strikers
during lunch: ‘‘Your quarrel is not with the resident manager. . . .
Stick by him. The quarrel is with the company.’’ (‘‘Loew’s speech
brought cheers between bites.’’)
Then suddenly the other shoe fell, and it all got very serious.
Mayer was only the local store manager, and at 2:00 his boss, A. J.

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 Girl Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big
Dahlquist, the district superintendent for Woolworth’s forty stores
in the Detroit area, showed up. Vita Terrall rounded everyone up
onto the main stairwell between the first and second floors, the only
place large enough for all to fit, for another meeting. Louis Koenig,
business agent for the waiters’ and waitresses’ union, once again
presented the strikers’ official demands, this time to Dahlquist: a
ten-cent an hour raise, union recognition, time and a half for over-
time after forty-eight hours, no charge for uniforms or for their
laundering, seniority rights within each department, free lunches
for the soda fountain workers up to fifty cents a day, and all new em-
ployees to be hired through the union office. It was quite a list—
note how the demands included monetary issues but also shorter
hours of work and, very importantly, regulation of the employment
process: a codified system of seniority to counter the capricious and
often sexually insidious decisions of individual managers, and a reg-
ularized system of initial employment, in which Woolworth’s man-
agement could hire only union members.
In reponse, Dahlquist told Koenig, the strikers, and their allies
essentially to drop dead. He had spoken to the Woolworth’s district
manager, O. L. Gause, he said, on the phone in Cleveland, and had
an ultimatum: ‘‘There will be no negotiation under any circum-
stances until the union organizers have left and the store is emp-
tied. . . . The store must be turned back to us.’’ Then he upped the
ante: if the strikers didn’t leave immediately, Woolworth’s would
lock out the workers at all its other thirty-nine stores in Detroit.
‘‘We will close every store in the city if necessary for an indefinite
period.’’
Most amazingly, the strikers were completely undaunted. They
greeted Dahlquist’s ferocious and quite serious ultimatum ‘‘with
some giggling, a modicum of jeering and great derisive shouting,’’
according to the Detroit News. Vita Terrall then stepped forward.
‘‘If we leave here we are licked,’’ she told the women. ‘‘We simply
must remain in the store.’’
‘‘Are you going to stick?’’ she asked.

[ 79 ]
 Dana Frank
‘‘We’ll stick!’’ they shouted back. ‘‘We’ll stay until the cows come
home,’’ a few piped in. And once again the women erupted in the
choruses of voice and song that would carry them through their
whole strike. First they belted out ‘‘America’’ over and over again, in
Dahlquist’s face. Then they sang other ‘‘patriotic songs.’’
By this time word had spread across the city of what the Wool-
worth’s strikers had done, and visitors from the Detroit labor move-
ment began to join them on the stairs to express solidarity. (Dahl-
quist must eventually have slunk away). Bill Marshall, President of
UAW Local 7 at the Chrysler plant showed up. So did Frances
Comfort from the Detroit Federation of Teachers. ‘‘I was really
thrilled when I heard what you cute kids had done,’’ she told the
strikers. ‘‘Some people say you’re lawbreakers, but I’m here, a
schoolteacher, proud to be among you. Many of you girls were in my
classes in school and there you were trained to expect something
from life.’’ But here they were instead, she said, ‘‘working for a
hopeless pay. . . . You are fighting not only for yourselves, but for
thousands of girls like yourselves all over the country.’’ It was all a
spectacular ritual of solidarity, and enormous fun.
But Dahlquist’s ultimatum had been a serious one. And it was
now clear that this wasn’t just a three-hour tour. Dahlquist agreed
to meet on Sunday at 2:00 p.m. with Louis Koenig of the Waiters’
and Waitresses’ Union, plus representatives of the cooks’ and retail
clerks’ unions—each of whom, in classic AFL fractional style,
claimed jurisdiction over a different group of Woolworth’s workers.
That meant, at the very least, that the women would be in the store
for the night and well into the next day. ‘‘Now the women’s work was
cut out for them,’’ as Floyd Loew later put it.

five and dime strikers settle in for long stay;

union officials rush in
By the time the Woolworth’s women had launched their strike,
though, workers in the Detroit area, across the United States, and
throughout Europe had fine-tuned the art of the sit-down strike. In

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 Girl Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big
a strike of any sort, the workers have a basic goal: to shut down the
employer’s business by withholding their labor. To do so, they need
to keep their own ranks solid so that none of the workers returns to
work, and they also need to prevent strikebreakers from getting in
to do the job. In conventional strikes of the 1930s, workers tried to
mount thick, raucous picket lines outside the workplace, both to
keep scabs from entering and to shore up their own spirits. There
was always the very concrete risk that employers would send in po-
lice, private security, or belligerent scabs to force their way through
the picket line and reopen the workplace.
A sit-down strike offered multiple advantages over a conven-
tional strike. First of all, scabs (managers today like to clean up their
reputation by referring to them as ‘‘replacement workers’’) couldn’t
take over the jobs of the striking workers because the strikers were
still right there, in the workplace. Moreover, employers would be
less inclined to send in the police to force out the strikers because
they’d then risk damaging their own property—that was part of the
cleverness of a sit-down. And if they did drag people out of the
workplace, they’d have to do so violently, producing unsavory pub-
licity for the company. The strikers, meanwhile, didn’t have to sur-
vive icy temperatures on the picket line (it dropped to twenty-six
degrees in Detroit on February 27)—they were cozily ensconced
inside, and if management decided to turn off the heat, well, that
might mean more bad publicity, frozen pipes, or even dangerous
fires. Labor activists had also discovered that sit-down strikes raised
the morale of the strikers. Squished in together, rather than isolated
at home or in small conversations on the picket line, the strikers’
spirits rose and an enormous group feeling developed—precisely
the sense of solidarity that working-class struggle is all about.
No one really knows when or where sit-down strikes were first
invented. Frank Murphy, the pro-labor governor of Michigan at the
time of the Woolworth’s strike, claimed that masons for the pha-
raohs of Egypt used sit-downs to address grievances in the tomb-
building industry. In 1715, workers hired to build the Rouen Ca-

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thedral in Lille, France, staged a sit-down strike. English textile
workers tried it in 1817. Closer to home, in 1884, workers at the
Jackson Brewery in Cincinnati barricaded themselves behind beer
barrels for sixty-five hours. The Industrial Workers of the World
(IWW) experimented with a sit-down strike in Schenectady, New
York, in 1906.
Only in the mid-1930s, though, did the sit-down emerge as a
popular and tremendously effective weapon for working people.
In 1934, 1935 and 1936, miners in Yugoslavia, Hungary, Poland,
Spain, Salonika, Wales, England, and France, all sat down. In May
and June of 1936 almost one-fifth of all wage earners in French fac-
tories and stores staged sit-down strikes. Well aware of what their
brothers and sisters were up to in Europe, U.S. unions soon began
to experiment with the strategy of occupying workplaces, espe-
cially meatpacking and auto plants, where activists began to perfect
the ‘‘quickie’’ sit-down, by which a short strike for modest demands
could produce results in a matter of hours. In 1936 a total of 34,565
U.S. workers occupied their workplaces in seventy different strikes;
most were less than a day long. All this meant a wealth of collective
experience. By the end of February 1937, the Detroit labor move-
ment in particular had refined its support systems, especially re-
garding the key logistics of food, bedding, and publicity.
In this explosive context the Woolworth’s workers were experi-
menting with their own use of a sit-down strike, and feeling out how
organized labor might aid them. According to one account, several
of the strikers had been members of Local 705 of the waiters’ and
waitresses’ union of Detroit before the strike; but another account
of equal reliability reported that none had previously been union
members. Whichever was the case, it’s clear that the women initi-
ated their actions entirely on their own, led, we can speculate, by
their own Vita Terrall.
The women didn’t, it turns out, just suddenly jump into action
when Floyd Loew blew the whistle. The details are sketchy, but at
some point on Friday morning—that is, the day before—a group of

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 Girl Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big
women had met with manager Frank Mayer and presented their
demands. He reportedly ‘‘promised to comply with their demands
as far as he could.’’ Not satisfied, the women held a big meeting that
Friday night, at which they formed themselves into a union. Again
on Saturday morning they presented their demands to Mayer.
Again he waffled, with a few promises of minor raises. It was then
that they decided to sit down—even though, we can note, they’d al-
ready won a bit by simply organizing a union and presenting de-
mands.
After the strike had commenced, Mayer whined duplicitously,
‘‘[It] came without warning. No one presented any demands to me
formally.’’ He conceded that ‘‘some of the girls spoke to me about
laundry bills yesterday, and the store has agreed to shoulder this re-
ponsibility.’’ He also claimed to have raised the waitresses’ pay by a
dollar a day, and announced magnanimously that new ‘‘girls start-
ing to work today’’ would be ‘‘hired at 29 cents an hour rather than
28 cents.’’ Of course that wouldn’t help the strikers one whit; nor
had Mayer put any of his offers in writing. ‘‘Sure we got a raise,’’ wi-
secracked one striker. ‘‘What are we going to do with that—buy
gum?’’
At some time during the day on Friday, representatives of the
Woolworth’s workers had also paid a visit to the waiters’ and wait-
resses’ union (Local 705 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant
Employees’ International Union, or HERE), in the nearby Law-
yers’ Building. ‘‘The Woolworth girls came to our offices with a list
of demands and asked us to help get them,’’ Mira Komaroff re-
called. From that point onward and to the very end, staff members
and rank-and-filers from Local 705 would play crucial roles in the
Woolworth’s strike.

Local 705 had three very distinct characters on its staff that day. The
first, and oldest, was Louis Koenig, the secretary-treasurer of the
local and very much the man in charge. Koenig (he pronounced it
Kerr-nik), about forty-nine at the time, was a taciturn fellow who al-

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most never smiled, hence his nickname ‘‘Smiley.’’ Koenig had been
born in Rohatyn, Austria, and had come to the United States when
he was fifteen. He’d worked for a while as a waiter at the New York
Stock Exchange Club and then become an officer of the Hotel
Employees and Restaurant Employees’ Union in New York. In
1916 Koenig moved to Detroit, where he and his pals working at the
Detroit Athletic Club, almost all immigrant men from Europe,
formed Local 705, the waiters’ union. After four years as the local’s
president, Koenig moved into its leading staff position and was still
there in 1937.
Koenig was a typical old-guard AFL business unionist. His lo-
cal—and it was very much his local—represented around six hun-
dred people in the mid-1930s, most of them waiters at the big
downtown hotels and a few elite clubs. During the Prohibition era,
Koenig had obtained most of the union’s contracts by picketing,
or threatening to picket, illegal bars and restaurants that served
booze. If the cops showed up, the joints would be busted, so it was
easier for employers to just sign with the union. Koenig’s methods
brought a few members into the local, but only from the top down.
Rank-and-file members had little role or presence in the local, and
he wanted it that way. Perhaps a dozen of its members were African
American. They weren’t allowed into the union’s meetings at all.
Known as the ‘‘Paradise Valley group,’’ they had to meet separately
in the basement.
Louis Koenig was never happy about allowing women into his
union, either. In 1925, Local 705 had merged with a new Detroit
waitresses’ union, but twelve years later Koenig remained hostile to
organizing women. ‘‘They get married and have babies,’’ he was still
complaining in 1972. ‘‘It’s a devil of a job keeping up with them.’’
Koenig’s attitude was classic. In the mid-1930s almost all the
AFL unions were hostile to allowing women into the labor move-
ment. Stereotypes abounded: women were flighty, only interested
in marrying, only in the labor force temporarily; white-collar work-
ers like secretaries and store clerks weren’t real ‘‘workers’’ worthy

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 Girl Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big
of the labor movement. Some AFL unions, such as the building
trades, machinists, and coal miners, actively kept women workers
out of their unions and froze them out of employment in their fields
altogether. Nonetheless, women workers constituted around 10
percent of all AFL members at the time. The vast majority of them
were in the big garment workers’ unions, in textile unions, or in
scattered unions representing waitresses, laundry workers, and ag-
ricultural workers.
Would the rising CIO change all that? In February of 1937 it
didn’t necessarily look that way. After all, the big thrust of CIO or-
ganizing in the fall of 1936 had been in mass production: steel, au-
tos, rubber, and electrical manufacturing. Except for the latter,
workers in these fields were almost entirely male; so were the hun-
dreds of activists who had gone out to organize them. Because the
CIO explicitly committed itself to the whole-industry organizing
principle rather than craft-by-craft jurisdictions, in theory it would
embrace all unskilled workers and therefore would help organize
women. But in practice almost all its energy so far had gone into or-
ganizing men. When the UAW had so spectacularly organized Gen-
eral Motors in the Flint sit-down strike that winter, it had banned
GM’s female clerical workers from joining the union.
For all his hostility to women unionists, Louis Koenig saw the
handwriting on the restaurant walls. In 1933, he met a politically
passionate young woman, Mira Komaroff, and offered her a job on
his union’s staff. At first he only let her work as a secretary, but soon
she was off organizing female hotel and restaurant workers as well
as men, and eventually Koenig was referring to Komaroff as his
protégée.
By all accounts, Mira Komaroff had a spectacular personality:
she was energetic, sharp as a tack, and could charm just about
anybody—the kind of woman that writers of the time described as
‘‘vivacious’’ and a ‘‘firebrand.’’ Thirty years after her death, people
who knew her, whatever they thought of her politics, still get an ad-
miring grin on their faces at the mention of her name; she had a

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rare, special charisma. In photographs she smiles right into the
camera and decades later looks as though she could walk right out
of the picture and talk you into anything.
Mira Komaroff was twenty-three in February of 1937. She came
from a middle-class Detroit family; her dad sold insurance and real
estate. She’d attended Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh for a year,
studying interior design, but had to drop out as the family’s finances
shriveled with the Great Depression. So she came back to Detroit
and jumped into labor and left-wing politics. In the middle years of
the Depression—1933–35—Mira belonged to the Proletarian
Party, a Marxist group that had split off from the Socialist Party in
1919. The Proletarian Party was famous for its educational activi-
ties—soapbox speakers, public meetings, and monthly study
groups for its members, which Mira attended regularly. Through
the party Mira deepened her understanding of class relationships
in the United States and of the need for working-class self-organi-
zation. She quickly became a key figure in Louis Koenig’s Local
705, working to expand the union in downtown Detroit hotels and
restaurants.
Then Floyd Loew showed up, and Mira was not happy about it.
Loew was older—about thirty-five in 1937—a ‘‘tough, muscular’’
guy who allegedly ‘‘could talk as effectively as he could use his fists.’’
(One union dissident later alleged that Loew had pushed him down
a flight of stairs at the local’s office.) Loew had grown up as a poor
Michigan farm boy and then worked his way around the country as
a waiter, becoming active in Hotel and Restaurant locals in Los An-
geles and Miami. He came to Detroit in 1935, where he got a job
waiting tables on the breakfast shift at the Book-Cadillac Hotel, and
he too got involved with the Proletarian Party. In early 1936, Koe-
nig hired Loew as an organizer. By all accounts, he was a great orga-
nizer—aggressive, energetic, and persuasive (but not ‘‘vivacious’’—
men never got to be ‘‘vivacious’’).
Mira Komaroff was deeply threatened by Floyd Loew. He was
on her turf, he was outshining her, he was older, and he was a man.

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 Girl Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big
In late 1936 Koenig gave him a big raise; now he made more money
than she did. Komaroff, meanwhile, had been offered a job by Gov-
ernor Frank Murphy, with the Michigan Employment Security
Commission; by early 1937 she was working full-time at the com-
mission and only organizing for Local 705 at night and on the
weekends.
Throughout January and early February, Loew, Komaroff, and
Max Gazan, of the local cooks’ union, had all worked together sup-
porting the Flint General Motors sit-down strike. Once again the
gender politics had gotten a bit thick. In the first days of the massive
strike, autoworkers’ wives had set up soup kitchens to feed the hun-
dreds of strikers inside the plant. They were overwhelmed with
work, so the UAW called on the cooks’ and waiters’ unions for help.
‘‘We’ll take care of it,’’ Loew offered. ‘‘But tell the women to pick up
their damn pots and pans and clear the hell out of here.’’ This does
not suggest that Loew would have been entirely respectful of the fe-
male strikers at Woolworth’s—or of Komaroff.
Certainly, though, Koenig, Komaroff, and Loew each brought
crucial assets to the Woolworth’s workers. For one thing, their orga-
nization legitimated the strike. The strikers were now supported by
an established union, with officers and everything, part of the
larger Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees’ International
Union, a national body. (By AFL jurisdictional etiquette, however,
the clerks would be assigned to the retail clerks’ union if the strike
succeeded, even though that union played only a token role in help-
ing them.) All three staffers from the waiters’ and waitresses’ union
had highly developed negotiating skills, and they quickly took over
that end of the strike—it was Koenig, not Vita Terrall, who pre-
sented the women’s demands to Dahlquist on the stairwell; it was
Koenig, plus male officials from the cooks’ and retail clerks’ unions,
who arranged to meet with the managers on Sunday. Finally, both
Komaroff and Loew had experience with the complex logistical de-
tails of figuring out how over a hundred people could eat, drink,
and sleep over in a five-and-dime store with only a few hours’ no-

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tice. That didn’t necessarily mean they entirely knew what they
were doing. ‘‘It was a real grass root [sic] movement and we were re-
ally green and . . . almost got run over,’’ Loew recalled fifty years
later. ‘‘We were all new and without experience.’’
For the most part we can only speculate about the concrete in-
teractions and negotiations between the strikers and the organiz-
ers. We do know that before they broke up their raucous meeting on
the stairwell that Saturday afternoon, the Woolworth’s strikers be-
gan to organize themselves internally, with help, evidently, from
Loew and Komaroff. They elected Vita Terrall as Strike Committee
chair and then formed themselves into seven other committees:
Food, Store Clean-up, Sales, Health, Cheer-up, Entertainment,
and Scrapbook.
Immediately the women sent word out to their families and
friends that they needed mattresses and blankets. In mid-after-
noon, Koenig and Charles Paulsen, from the cook’s union, arrived
with a truckload of mattresses, and the remaining strikers who
hadn’t volunteered for any committee now formed a Bed Commit-
tee to carry them. The mattresses were the old kind, of blue-and-
green jacquard fabric with big white floral designs and thick-
stitched borders. Tugging and pulling, the strikers splayed them
out along the first floor aisles, sideways, just barely fitting, so the
women’s heads and toes were almost up against the counters.
They’d have to sleep three to a mattress; each got her own brightly
colored plaid or striped blanket.
The women spent the rest of the afternoon perfecting the whole
layout and, once again, partying hard. ‘‘Radios blared . . . and the
clerks and fountain girls celebrated their own daring by dancing in
the aisles.’’ Various friends passed cigarettes into the store, and the
women set up a smoking section in the basement, which had a tiled
floor. They mobbed the phones once again, and again took up cards,
checkers, and singing—all the while posing for photographs, some-
times exuberantly, sometimes coyly, and sometimes with a look of
giggling astonishment at what they had done.

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 Girl Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big
Dinner was once again on the house, Mayer offered, so they ate
up the ice cream, hot dogs, and piles of jelly donuts arrayed on pol-
ished metal pedestals atop the counters. Mira announced that
11:00 p.m. would be curfew time. Slowly the chaos settled down. All
the men in the store left, except for Floyd Loew, the union orga-
nizer, and Frank Mayer, the store manager, who dragged cots up-
stairs. Mira stayed too, downstairs. The women gradually giggled
and whispered themselves to sleep. These were very young women,
many of whom had never spent the night away from home before,
and they were, after all, lying in the dark on the cold wooden floor
of a four-story variety store.
Suddenly someone let out a scream, and then more screams
spread across the store. A rat had jumped onto one of the mat-
tresses, and in its own panic at the first screech began leaping across
mattress after mattress, trying to escape. Panic broke out. Many of
the women were ready to leave right then and there. But a quick
huddle among Floyd, Mira, Vita, and a few others produced a solu-
tion: the women dragged their mattresses up to the second floor,
where, in theory, rats would fear to tread, since there was no food
on that level. Finally they all settled down—rats, strikers, organiz-
ers, and the boss—and the first day of the Woolworth’s strike was
over.

canaries join song raised by woolworth girls

as primping replaces clerking
Sunday, February 28. Curfew lifted at 8 a.m. The strikers crawled
out of bed, got out their compacts, put on their makeup, and pre-
pared for the reporters who, they knew, were about to rush in. ‘‘We
had plenty of mattresses, blankets, and pillows and all of us slept
well,’’ Vita Terrall told the press.
Saturday had been dramatic, to say the least, and lots of fun
amidst all the confrontation, but now the women settled into a daily
routine. Now the committee structure kicked in. Now their friends
came by and slipped them nightgowns, toothpaste, more blankets,

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cosmetic cases, and more cigarettes, which the women piled up on
the counters in the basement. Floyd and Mira warned the strikers
not to touch a thing that belonged to the store, but they seemed to
have touched quite a lot, even if the counters were carefully cov-
ered with the brown wrapping paper. All those useful objects for
which Woolworth’s was so famous became, well, useful; the novelty
items, lots of fun. The Sales Committee carefully kept track of it
all: the strikers didn’t steal or hurt anything, they just did a little
shopping.
The Health Committee had a bit of work to do, too. Within the
first twenty-four hours there was a run on ‘‘headache tablets.’’ Re-
porters also noted, somewhat intrusively, that the change in the
women’s diet caused constipation, so someone brought in a supply
of mineral oil and the women were all required to swallow a big
spoonful every morning, under the supervision of a physician who
showed up every day. The women joined in daily sit-ups and other
calisthenics, too.
They also tightened up the food logistics. On Sunday morning,
the strikers kicked out the manager for good, and took over the food
operations themselves. From now on volunteers from the cook’s
union, coordinated by Floyd Loew, prepared their food in a kitchen
set up outside, then carried it in to the lunch counter in the base-
ment, where the women served each other. The strikers, after all,
included waitresses, bakery assistants, and cooks. Some of the food
they prepared themselves in the store’s own kitchen. It was all bril-
liantly convenient. At Woolworth’s—in contrast to those famous
strikes in automobile factories—the women had a kitchen, cleaning
supplies, headache tablets, safety pins, plus bathrooms and a candy
counter all right there.
They set up systems for daily maintenance too: the Clean-up
Committee swept floors, washed counters, and watched for rats.
One group of women took care of feeding the canaries and cleaning
their cages in the basement. As time passed, some of the strikers
started washing clothes in the store’s various sinks and hung them

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 Girl Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big
out to dry on the fire escape. In other words, they made themselves
at home.
All this time they stayed in close contact with their friends and
families, sweethearts and husbands through constant phone calls
on the store’s three phones and furtive contacts through the front
door. The situation was clearly stressful for some or the women
wouldn’t have formed their Cheer-up Committee. ‘‘This committee
served as a very important committee,’’ Floyd Loew later wrote,
‘‘because most of the young women still lived at home and this en-
deavor was an overwhelming experience for such young partici-
pants.’’ In another memoir, he recalled, ‘‘The Cheer-up Committee
was made up of a smiling and bubbly bunch of women and they
were really needed. They watched for the first curling lip and they
soon had all sadness chased away.’’
All in all, though, the strikers were still having a great time. A
Pathé Newsreels team that showed up Sunday commented with a
bit of puzzlement, ‘‘They seem to enjoy themselves despite the trou-
bled atmosphere.’’ These young women were used to working six
days a week, nine hours a day, standing on their feet the entire time.
All of a sudden they not only had the day off, but they could play all
they wanted. By that morning they had changed into sensible shoes,
T-shirts, and pants.
Some of the women played with the canaries; some of them
gathered in small groups and played cards and checkers. Two
women in loud plaid playsuits with matching square caps slid down
the banisters, over and over. Dozens sat on the main stairwell and
took up knitting, crotcheting, and embroidery, utilizing the sec-
ond floor’s cornucopia of embroidery hoops, knitting needles, and
skeins of yarn.
The women moved in on the sheet music department, too, and
sang on the stairs for hours and hours. (A newsreel captures them
swaying back and forth on the stairs, singing, one playing a man-
dolin, another holding, mysteriously, a toilet plunger.) A favorite,
which they sang over and over again, was ‘‘Hail, hail, the gang’s all

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 Dana Frank
here.’’ They also liked ‘‘Pennies from Heaven’’ and rewrote a verse
of ‘‘John Brown’s Body’’ as ‘‘We’ll hang old Woolworth to a sour
apple tree.’’ Another favorite was ‘‘Mademoiselle from Armen-
tieres,’’ to which they made up their own words:

Sit down girls, sit down girls,

Parlez-vous.
Sit down girls, come sit down, don’t be afraid to [stand your ground?].
Hinky dinky parlez-vous.

Someone hauled in a Victrola; records appeared. Radios blared.

They danced in couples. The Entertainment Committee organized
‘‘impromptu entertainments’’ (what they were exactly we’ll just
have to leave up to our imaginations). And they arranged for the
musicians’ union to show up nightly for free concerts, to which they
also danced.
We know much of this because much of it took place in front of
dozens of reporters—not just those faces pressed to the glass out
front, but Life magazine, famous national radio broadcaster H. V.
Kaltenborn, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, the Daily
Worker, Women’s Wear Daily, Pathé Newsreels, and three daily
and one weekly newspaper from Detroit, among others.
The media world rushed in, but what did it see? Kaltenborn, the
radio man, loved the strike: ‘‘The CIO unions might want to take
lessons from the Five-and-Ten cent crew on strike strategy,’’ he
told the nation. For Kaltenborn, the strike was a serious demonstra-
tion of how to build a powerful labor movement.
But for almost all the other reporters the occupation was any-
thing but serious. Rather it offered an opportunity to trivialize the
women as silly girls playing strike and to titillate readers with their
alleged obsession with beauty and boys. Every single report de-
scribed the strikers as ‘‘girls,’’ never as women, although most were
over the age of eighteen, and many were in their twenties, thirties,
or forties. Their gender was always identified; they were always ‘‘girl

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 Girl Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big
strikers,’’ unlike the General Motors sit-downers, for example, who
were ‘‘striking workers,’’ and almost never ‘‘boys’’ except very rarely
in a jovial, comradely sense. Even the Communist Party’s Daily
Worker couldn’t resist referring to the women’s hair color and body
type: ‘‘Young girls, blonde, brunette, slim, plump, going on strike
for their rights.’’
Life magazine, in a big, four-page photo spread published after
the strike was over, cast it as ‘‘Camp Woolworth’’: ‘‘The newest type
of camping excursion is attended not by children of the rich but by
members of the working classes. . . . Youngest, prettiest, most pre-
vailingly feminine of such recent ‘campers’ were the 110 girls in
Detroit’s main Woolworth store who went on strike Feb. 27.’’ The
story continued with cute references to ‘‘camp duties,’’ ‘‘camp
equipment,’’ and a ‘‘sit-down picnic’’ in Woolworth’s ‘‘camping
ground.’’
In account after account, the strikers were alleged to be ob-
sessed with beauty. ‘‘Night and day one hundred girls occupy the
closed store and primping replaces clerking,’’ intoned Pathé News-
reels. The strikers, the press noted, had set up their own beauty par-
lor in a corner of the store: ‘‘Everyone got a manicure and finger
wave.’’ Life assured, ‘‘A good appearance is maintained by Wool-
worth girls who comb their hair in the women’s rest room and do
not allow their camping excursion to interfere with their prinking
[preening].’’
The women were also supposed to be obsessed with boyfriends.
The strike started on a Saturday, offering reporters the opportunity
to focus on the all-important Saturday night date as a threat to
working-class solidarity. ‘‘Many girls wanted to leave the store be-
cause of a ‘date with the boy friend,’ ’’ reported the Detroit Times.
‘‘These requests Miss Terral [sic] refused.’’ A reporter for the
Detroit News did a little eavesdropping on Saturday afternoon.
‘‘ ‘Gosh, I’ve got a date with my boy friend,’ ’’ a dark-haired girl
named Mazie supposedly worried. ‘‘ ‘I can’t reach him by telephone,
either. He’s going to think I’m standing him up.’ ’’

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 Dana Frank
These all-important dates allegedly produced the strike’s only
reported deserters. According to the Detroit News, ‘‘The first sign
of any defection came at 3 p.m.,’’ when Vita Terrall ‘‘discovered half
a dozen girls deserted to keep Saturday night dates. They got out of
the building through a basement door, through the assistance of
two stock room boys, who were not on strike.’’
It’s impossible to distinguish between what the Woolworth’s
strikers actually did and thought and how they were depicted.
Clearly some of them were sincerely concerned about dates; but we
only know that because reporters repeatedly brought the question
up. We don’t know if any of the Flint workers, for example, were just
as worried about their own dates. We do know that the Woolworth’s
strikers themselves, on their second or third day, set up a ‘‘Love
Booth.’’ Boyfriends could enter the store and inhabit the booth for
five minutes with their sweeties. (We are left imagining exactly what
the couples might have accomplished in precisely five minutes.)
A favorite angle in the press was a little book called How to Get
Your Man and Hold Him, with which, they insisted, the strikers
were obsessed. A Detroit News photographer captured four women
propped up on their stomachs on the floral-patterned mattresses,
each reading a copy in what was clearly a posed shot. The Detroit
Times reported that ‘‘a little huddle in one corner’’ had snatched up
the book. ‘‘The girl who held the book was surrounded by others
who pored over her shoulders and under her arms, intent on solving
the problem.’’ Life caught a photo of a huge, just unwrapped pile of
over two hundred copies of the book—offering ‘‘Secrets of Flat-
tery’’ for only ten cents—but conceded that ‘‘most of [the women]
are sufficiently good-looking to make scholarly study of romantic
technique unnecessary.’’ One account claimed that the strikers had
requested that the union buy them all copies, but it seems more
plausible that Woolworth’s simply had a large quantity in supply that
day—another cheap, useful item.
In the media’s eyes, then, the Woolworth’s strikers were like
Barbara Hutton: obsessed with beauty, makeup, hair, and fashion,

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 Girl Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big
and eager to parlay all four, along with a big dose of sparkle and flat-
tery, to capture the man of their choice.
But of course it was all more complicated than that. The strikers
were quite capable of manipulating the media right back. They
were the ones who called Pathé Newsreels to come film them in the
first place. The sleek somber skirts and dressy, formal lace collars
the clerks are wearing in press photos from Saturday might have
been their regular work clothes, or the strikers may have dressed to
the nines that morning, knowing full well they were about to be
photographed by every paper in town. They definitely didn’t wear
high heels on normal work days. Once on strike the women read
newspapers voraciously; discarded papers piled up in mountains in
the aisles. The newspapers, in turn, ran photos of the strikers lined
up at the lunch counter reading about themselves in the very same
papers. The strikers were so conscious of the role of the media that
one of the very first committees they set up was the Scrapbook
Committee, to save all those stories about themselves. In other
words, the women were both aware of media attention and able to
employ it for their own ends, in part to buoy their spirits in what
was, after all, a dicey situation.
Ironically, the ‘‘silly girls playing strike’’ media pitch gave the
strikers power. It kept them on the front pages of the papers for days
on end. Their very innocence legitimated their struggle. If these
were just silly girls, why should Woolworth’s exploit them? And if
these were boy-crazy young things, just having a bit of fun in the
aisles, it would certainly not look good at all if Woolworth’s sent in
the National Guard or thugs to drag them out by their carefully
coiffed hair. Being cast as silly and a little stupid, in other words,
protected them.
Being white girls protected them, too. Imagine the response if
the strikers had been African American. Media sympathy for their
plight as oppressed workers wouldn’t have been in place before-
hand—no Bing Crosby crooning hit songs that built up sympathy.
Once on strike, police and public tolerance for their lawbreaking

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 Dana Frank
behavior would have been zero. Media interest outside the African
American press would be mostly nonexistent or hostile. And Life
would certainly not have shown up to depict them playing at
Camp Woolworth.
If the Woolworth strikers’ whiteness and their supposed silli-
ness protected them, equally importantly, their beauty culture
wasn’t stupid at all. They knew that it was useful to powder their
noses and put on a bit of lipstick before the reporters rushed in the
door on Sunday morning. They took pleasure in making each other
up and in looking good—that was why they set up a beauty parlor
in the store. Photographs of the last day of their strike show them
glowing, almost all with a set of beautiful curls, a bow in their hair,
and a corsage, which, we can suspect, they had crafted from mate-
rials in the store during their occupation. Historian Kathy Peiss, in
her wonderful study Hope in a Jar, has shown how savvy and artful
working-class women were in their use of cosmetics. Women, she
writes, deployed makeup ‘‘to declare themselves—to announce
their adult status, sexual allure, youthful spirit, political beliefs—
and even to proclaim the right to self-definition.’’ Boys and sex
could be fun, too. There was nothing wrong with wanting to go out
on Saturday night for a kiss, a few well-placed squeezes, or maybe a
lot more. And some of the women were in fact married.
‘‘Getting a man and holding him’’ was in fact a smart economic
strategy. Think about it: these were young working-class women in
the depths of the Great Depression. What were their choices? Stay
single, stay in the labor force, join a union, go on strike, better their
wages and working conditions—O.K., they were doing that. Or
they could find a young man with a steady job and good wages, and
marry him. In many ways that was the best choice available, and
they knew it. They also knew that statistically, their chances of mar-
riage had gotten slimmer and slimmer during the Depression. ‘‘We
have no money to get married,’’ one Woolworth clerk told a New
York interviewer in 1939. ‘‘Unless Lady Luck comes along, we
never will.’’

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 Girl Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big
The very first page of How to Get Your Man and Hold Him only
confirmed their choices: ‘‘No nice girl admits it out loud, but it is
nevertheless true that there comes a time in every girl’s life when
she is seized with an urge to get married.’’ The cause could be
‘‘strictly biological,’’ or the urge could be caused by a Clark Gable
movie, the author speculated, but it could also be caused by:

(a) The sudden realization that spinsterhood is just around the corner.
(b) The struggle to make both ends meet on one under-nourished pay
envelope.
(c) Being fed up with the monotonous business of punching a time clock and
writing letters.

Given the alternatives, in other words, it was smart to keep that

date. Mazie needed to make that phone call or her boyfriend might
think she was standing him up; she needed to paint her nails, or he
might do a little shopping around himself.
Because they weren’t, in fact, Barbara Hutton. She was rich,
they were poor. She was rich because they were poor. These young
women needed men for enormous economic reasons; Barbara Hut-
ton had millions of her own and could buy a man by crooking her
glittering little finger in his direction.
In their reports on the strike, labor and left-wing publications
jumped on the contrast. The Michigan Labor Paper headlined an
editorial ‘‘The Countess and the Counter Girl.’’ The Daily Worker,
in a story on the strike, ran a photograph not of the strikers them-
selves, but of Barbara Hutton. Best of all, the Woolworth’s strikers
made up wonderful songs about Hutton, and the press repeated
them:

Barbara Hutton’s got the dough, parlez vous.

We know where she got it, too, parlez vous.
We slave at Woolworth’s five-and-dime,
The pay we get is sure a crime.
Hinky dinky parlez vous.

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 Dana Frank
Some of the women working at Woolworth’s that first morning
may have decided hanging on to their man was in fact more impor-
tant than striking—hence the basement-door deserters, although
there were plenty of other reasons for skipping out. But the major-
ity of the women tried to mediate between the two strategies, to
make striking and seducing compatible. ‘‘Sure I love you,’’ one
striker assures someone on the phone in a newsreel, ‘‘but we’re
sticking right here until we win.’’ We don’t really know: maybe their
sweeties were militant union activists who loved them all the more
because they were on strike.
Many of the strikers leapt to enforce solidarity among the ranks
lest their sisters waver. Not only did Vita Terrall police the doors,
but on that Saturday night, when ‘‘some of the girls thought of their
dates and tried to get out,’’ according to the Detroit News, ‘‘Mae, of
the sodas . . . just stuck her gum in the locks on the back doors.
Those doors are locked for keeps.’’ When Mazie, quoted earlier, al-
legedly lamented she couldn’t get ahold of her boyfriend, ‘‘ ‘Forget
it,’ said her blond next-door neighbor, Sally. ‘Don’t you suppose he’ll
hear about this? . . . And anyhow . . . this is more important than
your boyfriend. We’ve got to win this strike.’ ’’
Defections aside, the women’s beauty culture could also support
their sense of community and solidarity. They had a lot of time to
kill; they could bond by sharing tips on curling irons and clever flat-
tery; they could keep themselves distracted by making out with
boyfriends in that Love Booth; they could imagine a happy married
future . . . and not worry about what the outcome of their strike
might be.
In the rare instances we have in which the Woolworth’s strikers
spoke to the public directly, they didn’t mention beautification at all
but articulated the concrete reasons for their sit-down. ‘‘All we want
is a living wage,’’ they said, in big red crayon letters on pieces of
cardboard and brown wrapping paper they put in the front win-
dows facing the street. In Pathé’s first newsreel of the strike, a
woman in her twenties with brown hair, carefully pencilled arched

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 Girl Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big
eyebrows, glossy lipstick, and a striped cotton top says to the cam-
era, very seriously: ‘‘We have the best food that anyone could ask
for, and when we get our union, we hope that it will be recognized
throughout all the retail stores so as to give us shorter hours and liv-
ing wages. I thank you.’’ She made a little bow, and smiled. She was
probably Vita Terrall.
And there were other ways to resolve the contradiction between
striking and seducing. The Love Booth aside, the strikers were, af-
ter all, having a great time without men. Once Loew and Mayer
moved upstairs, the strike was one big endless all-female slumber
party of indeterminate duration. The women did each other’s nails
and hair with loving affection and danced with their arms around
each other’s waists. If you watch Pathé’s first newsreel carefully, you
can catch one of the strikers reaching over to tickle the back of the
woman next to her.
Sunday night, they tucked themselves in and dreamed sugary
dreams of sweethearts, Barbara Hutton, and a living wage.

woolworth strike escalates

as unions close second store
The strikers were having a great time, but the purpose of their
strike wasn’t to guarantee they had lots of fun; the goal, after all, was
to get Woolworth’s management to give in on wages, hours of work,
and a sea of other demands. While all that dancing was going on on
Sunday, the situation hadn’t moved toward a resolution one whit. By
Monday, March 1, two days had passed and Woolworth’s hadn’t
budged an inch.
So on Monday, the unions escalated the situation dramatically,
heightening the pressure on the Woolworth’s managers and raising
the stakes for everyone involved.
On Saturday afternoon, Louis Koenig had evidently threatened
to close all forty Woolworth stores in Detroit, with their 1,000 em-
ployees. A bluff, maybe? Sometime on Monday in the morning or
early afternoon, officials of the cooks’, waiters’, and retail clerks’

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 Dana Frank
unions had a private meeting downtown. Then, at 3:00, Mira Ko-
maroff and other folks from the three unions drove down Wood-
ward Avenue to a second, smaller Woolworth’s store at 6565 Grand
Boulevard, just off Woodward. They met briefly with a few of the
twenty-six women who worked as clerks and waitresses there. At
3:30 sharp, Mira yelled out, ‘‘Strike! Strike!’’ and eleven women
stopped working. ‘‘There was no disorder as the clerks who did not
desire to participate donned wraps and left,’’ reported the Daily
Worker. ‘‘The striking girls clustered about the soda fountain, talk-
ing with the union organizers. Customers departed, doors were
locked.’’ Mira and the other officials bought ‘‘a supply of food at the
lunch counter with which to feed the strikers.’’ Then they asked all
the managers to leave. ‘‘There was no violence,’’ reported the De-
troit Times, once again. And now a second Woolworth’s store was
occupied by striking women.
Now the unions’ threats to escalate the strike to all forty stores
in Detroit looked a whole lot more serious. Monday night, Louis
Koenig cast his own ultimatum back at Woolworth’s, upping the
ante still further: ‘‘Unless the strike here is settled within a week of
the time it started [i.e., by Saturday, March 6],’’ he proclaimed, ‘‘I
will ask the executive council of our association to call a national sit-
down’’—thus closing all the Woolworth’s stores in the country.
Local solidarity in support of the strikers at both stores shot up.
A formal system of picketing outside kicked in. During the next few
days ‘‘nearly every hotel worker in the downtown area found their
way to the Woolworth store to wish the women luck,’’ Loew re-
called. One visitor was Paul Domeney, an immigrant from Transyl-
vania who worked as a room service waiter at the Book-Cadillac lux-
ury hotel in downtown Detroit at the time, and was active as a leftist
within the waiters’ union. Together with Mira Komaroff he visited
the picket line and even went inside the store to talk with the strik-
ers and help shore up their spirits. Homer Martin, national presi-
dent of the United Auto Workers, came in and gave a big pep talk,
pledging his union’s ongoing support.

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 Girl Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big
Local Detroit activists like Paul Domeney, Mira Komaroff, and
Floyd Loew assiduously sought to evade the growing national split
between the jurassic AFL and the upstart CIO. While conflict be-
tween the two titans turned increasingly nasty on the national level,
unionists on the ground in Detroit tried hard to keep working to-
gether in the interests of solidarity. ‘‘Our unions are AFL affiliates
but we are working peaceably with [the] CIO,’’ Mira Komaroff went
out of her way to insist to the press. The waiters’ and waitresses’
union, affiliated nationally with the Hotel Employees and Restau-
rant Employees’ International Union was, on the one hand, still an
AFL union, as were the retail clerks. The United Auto Workers, on
the other hand, was the quintessential CIO affiliate, challenging
AFL craft jurisdictions as handily as it had taken on General Mo-
tors. Frank Martel, president of the Detroit and Wayne County
Federation of Labor, emerged as a rare figure in this period, trying
to bridge the gap between CIO and AFL. He not only showed up
at the Woolworth’s strike downtown the minute it broke out, but on
Monday carefully told the press that ‘‘the local Federation would
have been inadequate to handle the appeals of strikers had not the
automobile union lent assistance.’’
Throughout the country, unions, working people, and their al-
lies rushed to express their support for the Woolworth’s strikers.
Edward Flore, national president of HERE, announced that he
would arrive in Detroit on the next Monday, March 8. Telegrams
flooded in from Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, New York, and all
over, both to the Woolworth’s strikers directly and to the national of-
fices of HERE and the retail clerks’ union. Someone named W. J.
Boenckleman, from New Orleans, sent a telegram saying he held
thirty shares of Woolworth’s stock and was ‘‘100% with the sit-
downers in their efforts to enforce demands.’’ The strikers plas-
tered their telegrams all over the store’s ground-floor windows for
all to see.
Supporters also sent cash to support the strikers, who needed
money for food, supplies, and to replace the earnings they were for-

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 Dana Frank
going with every passing day. Vita Terrall announced on Monday
that the AFL had donated $1,000. Union staffers assured the press
that the strikers had been guaranteed enough funds ‘‘to continue
the strike indefinitely,’’ with money promised from Chicago, New
York, and other cities.
The unions did everything they could to publicize all this sup-
port, to signal to Woolworth’s that they were invincible. But at the
same time, in private, they were doing everything they could to cre-
ate a way out for the corporation by setting up possible avenues for
mediation. Throughout Monday and Tuesday rumors floated all
over town that either the Detroit Board of Commerce or the De-
troit Retail Merchants Association would be mediating a set-
tlement.
But for all that, Woolworth’s didn’t move—or so it seemed.
Think about the situation from Woolworth’s point of view. Its
managers were caught between a rock of solidarity and a very ex-
pensive place. Unlike the ‘‘girls,’’ they were not happy campers, and
with every passing play day, they got less happy.
Who exactly was ‘‘Woolworth’s’’ anyway? Ultimately, the corpo-
ration rested in the hands of its stockholders who, in 1937, included
Frank Woolworth’s heirs, the company’s longtime upper-level man-
agers and their heirs, and those who had bought its stock in later de-
cades. In practice, an elaborate chain of command stretched up-
ward and outward from local managers like Frank Mayer. When the
strike started on Saturday morning, Mayer called his own boss,
Dahlquist, the Detroit area manager—the man who issued the ulti-
matum at the top of the stairs that afternoon. Dahlquist, in turn,
had called O. L. Gause, of Woolworth’s regional headquarters in
Cleveland. But even Gause wasn’t really in charge; he then an-
swered to the executives in the Woolworth’s building in New York
City. All these men—and they were all men—answered to Charles
Deyo, the company’s president.
The very elaborateness and length of this chain of command,
combined with the firm’s geographic dispersal in an era of expen-

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 Girl Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big
sive long-distance phone calls, slowed down the negotiation pro-
cess immensely. This was no quickie, no three-hour tour, unlike so
many of the dozens of sit-down strikes in Detroit the week before,
in part because it took more than three hours for communication to
move up, let alone back down, the chain of command.
The big shots in New York did everything they could to act like
indifferent power figures at an omnipotent corporation swatting
away the Detroit sit-downers like pesky flies. On Monday, after the
occupation of the second store began, Edward P. Houbert, a lawyer
for the company, insisted, ‘‘Our attitude is still the same—we will
not bargain, as long as strikers remain in the stores.’’ Company vice
president E. C. Mauchly ‘‘telegraphed from New York that the
strike was a local incident and would have to be handled through
the district headquarters at Cleveland,’’ Women’s Wear Daily re-
ported.
But Woolworth’s bigness also meant that the stakes were higher.
If the company gave in and granted the strikers’ demands, it would
cost a lot of money—not just in wages at the two stores on strike, but
in the other forty Detroit stores as well. The stores’ profits would
drop and perhaps the company’s stock price would plummet as
well.
The managers had no way of knowing, moreover, if a small—but
very very public—settlement with the unions in Detroit would lead
to organizing efforts and sit-down strikes at their stores all over the
country, or even in Canada, Great Britain, Germany, or Cuba.
More broadly, they would have been deeply hostile, ideologically, to
unions, especially the militant kind that occupied their property
and held them hostage. They had a stake in drawing the line against
the national upsurge of union activism under way, and some among
them might even have been a little bit worried about a social
revolution.
Much as it might have wanted to uphold their own version
of corporate class solidarity during the Depression, Woolworth’s
also had to keep looking over its shoulder at its competitors. A set-

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 Dana Frank
tlement might disrupt its position in relation to other variety
stores snapping at the heels of its market share, in particular S. S.
Kresge—headquartered, coincidentally, in Detroit. Kresge itself,
watching the sit-down handwriting on its own wall that Saturday,
raised the wages of its own Detroit workers from $14 to $17 a week
within five hours of the Woolworth’s strike. Kresge’s thus cleverly
averted any labor action in its own stores, plus it enjoyed the nice
side benefit of being open while Woolworth’s was closed.
Last but not least, the public relations pressures on Woolworth’s
were enormous. The movement against ‘‘the chain store menace’’
was at its peak. It was the Great Depression, and here was a gi-
ant corporation exploiting innocent young white women. And of
course, with their songs and pickets the strikers themselves kept re-
minding the public of the self-indulgent Barbara Hutton. Polls re-
vealed that public opinion largely supported the new sit-down
strikes. Working-class people were especially enthusiastic. And
they shopped at Woolworth’s—or at least they had before the strike.
Woolworth’s had three basic choices: one, settle; two, hold out
and see if the strikers would give up; or three, send in the police.
The armed solution was a real option. All the company had to do
was get a judge to issue an injunction against the strikers on tres-
passing charges and in theory it would be able to call upon the De-
troit police or the National Guard to evict the strikers forcibly. That
same Saturday another strike had erupted at the Ferro Stamping
Company in Detroit, and by Tuesday its owners had obtained an in-
junction. The strikers had left the plant voluntarily, defeated. But
not all judges would comply, and for a brief time in February and
March, both the mayor of Detroit and Governor Frank Murphy
were unwilling to send in troops to evict sit-downers—that was one
reason why the General Motors strikers had won. The Detroit Free
Press reported on Sunday that A. J. Dahlquist had ‘‘indicated that
police action to gain evacuation was contemplated,’’ but it seems to
have been an empty threat. We have no other evidence that Wool-
worth’s ever considered a forcible solution. Again, to do so would

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 Girl Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big
have been a spectacular public relations fiasco; all those nasty cops,
all those manicured nails.
Clearly the strikers, when lined up in solidarity with all their al-
lies all over the country, held enormous power over the corpora-
tion. Notice just one detail: when the women occupying the second
store asked their own bosses to leave the store, the men filed out like
obedient sheep.
But that didn’t mean victory. It just meant that Woolworth’s was
feeling the heat.

sit-downs spread in area hotels;

will send funds, say new york unions
Tuesday, March 2. Day four of the Woolworth’s strike. National soli-
darity ratcheted up another big notch. The executive committee of
the big, radical Local #1250 of the Retail Clerks’ International Pro-
tective Association in New York met that night, then dispatched a
telegram of ringing support: ‘‘Congratulations courageous Wool-
worth workers. Notify us how we can cooperate.’’ They had already
planned a big dance for the coming Saturday night at the Savoy
Ballroom, at 140th and Lenox Avenue, to benefit the Loyalist cause
in the Spanish Civil War. On Tuesday night they voted to donate 25
percent of the take to their sisters in Detroit. Most importantly, the
union was planning a demonstration for that same Saturday, March
6, which, it announced in a national press release, ‘‘will open a boy-
cott of the Woolworth stores in New York pending the outcome of
the strike.’’ To keep the pressure on, a delegation from several local
unions would call on Woolworth executives to notify them officially
of the planned boycott and ‘‘urge granting of the Detroit demands.’’
Hinting at future direct action of their own, the retail clerks’ union
also issued a statement that working conditions in New York City
‘‘were as bad or worse than those in Detroit.’’
By now people all over the country had been following the story
for days. The papers had headlined the story since Saturday, the
newsreels were now in the movie theaters, and regular working

[ 105 ]
 Dana Frank
folks had had time to think about what the women were doing. The
Communist Party’s Daily Worker, based in New York, sent reporter
Louise Mitchell out to check on what local Woolworth’s workers had
to say about their sisters in Detroit. ‘‘The slight, undernourished
counter girl in a crisp white collar’’ who worked at the ‘‘wash cloth
counter’’ confided, ‘‘Everyone is talking about it. . . . Everyone who
comes in. . . . There’s something going on all right.’’ She was no
dummy about cause and effect, either: ‘‘Everybody is sitting down.
If you want something you just take a squat and they come to
terms.’’ At a different variety store, ‘‘over the sandwich counter,’’ ‘‘a
fair platinum haired girl’’ told Mitchell, ‘‘I’d like to sit right down
now and do I wish I was there. If we ever did it in New York . . .
they’d have a job to combat it.’’ The ‘‘girl’’ behind the stationery
counter agreed: ‘‘Wait till this thing comes to New York. Of course
it’ll come. We’re all watching them and not saying much.’’
Closer to home, the lid burst off the top of labor activism
in Detroit. Thousands of local workers had also had a few days to
contemplate what the Woolworth’s women were doing and be in-
spired themselves. Now service workers in downtown Detroit as
well as factory workers suddenly sat down. Tuesday, at Stouffer’s,
sixty waitresses and kitchen workers occupied their restaurant at
the middle of the lunchtime rush. Workers at Huyler’s Cafeteria in
the Fisher Building sat down at the same time, then barricaded
the doors.
For every actual sit-down, hundreds of employers fearful of po-
tential strikes raised their workers’ wages, as had S. S. Kresge.
Again, the mere threat of a strike produced swift results. ‘‘More
wage increases have been made effective within the past few days
by local stores,’’ reported Women’s Wear Daily on Tuesday, ‘‘in an-
ticipation of projected unionization efforts. . . . There are various
rumors cropping up regarding sit-down strikes in other local stores,
but none have developed.’’ That same day Anthony A. Henk, secre-
tary of the Detroit Retail Merchants Association, ‘‘announced that

[ 106 ]
 Girl Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big
about 800 clerks in 450 meat shops and groceries would receive im-
mediate wage increases averaging 5 percent.’’
‘‘Brothers, we’ve got ’em on the run!’’ exulted the Detroit Labor
News that week. But it didn’t bode well that the Labor News wrote
the sisters out of labor’s success story so quickly; indeed, by Tuesday
the focus of stories about Detroit activism had begun to move away
from the Woolworth’s strikers. New strikes bumped them off the
front page, and soon most papers reduced them to a tiny side refer-
ence in a general labor story or dropped them altogether.
The new hotel and restaurant strikes in downtown Detroit,
moreover, siphoned off the organizing support of Louis Koenig,
Mira Komaroff, Floyd Loew, and other union staffers, who now
spent their days helping with other efforts. Mary Davis, a rank-and-
file union waitress at the time, remembers going down to pay a soli-
darity visit at Woolworth’s on Monday or Tuesday, as a fellow mem-
ber of Local 705. The picket line was small, she recalls—maybe
thirty people. Five or six of the picketers were left-wing activists
like herself, but the rest were very depressed and discouraged
Woolworth strikers, all of them women in their twenties or thirties
who weren’t inside because of family commitments or because they
hadn’t been at work the day the strike began. They told Mary that
the strikers weren’t getting very much support from the union, and
that they were very worried.
We don’t know much about exactly what was going on within the
store on Tuesday or the next day, precisely because the press had by
and large moved on to other stories. Life magazine showed up on
one of these days, and while it captured the two women sliding
down bannisters in their funny playsuits, other women they spoke
to admitted to being bored. We can only wonder if everyone was
getting along after all that time in close quarters together. One
woman photographed by Life had abandoned the three-person
mattresses on the floor and made a bed for herself on a countertop.
By mid-week the women had exhausted the store’s supply of sani-

[ 107 ]
 Dana Frank
tary napkins, and new supplies had to be brought in. At some point
during the occupation, one woman miscarried.
Would they really be able to manage all the logistics necessary
to hold out as days stretched into weeks? As a rule, the longer a
strike, the more likely it is to be lost. Usually it’s either a quick vic-
tory within hours or a day, or a long, extended, painful exhaustion of
resources, spirits, and public interest, chipping away slowly at soli-
darity and the workers’ power. By now, the first flush of excitement
over and press attention waning, the Woolworth’s strikers would
have had plenty of time to think about what would happen if they
lost: they’d certainly lose a week’s pay, likely lose their jobs, and
maybe even be blacklisted by Detroit’s other stores and restaurants.
The families of the single women might be rock-solid behind them,
or they might be increasingly irritated that they weren’t around to
help wash the dishes or watch their little brothers at night. The hus-
bands of married strikers might be home patching together meals
in proud solidarity, or they might be getting impatient, even angry.
And those boyfriends—rather than holding their men, some of the
strikers might be letting them slip away.
If they lost the strike, moreover, the negative ripple effects
would be immense. And despite all that glorious solidarity and the
upsurge of new strikes, Woolworth’s still hadn’t budged. Tuesday
came and went. O. L. Gause, the company’s regional supervisor in
Cleveland, said only that they were ‘‘surveying the situation’’ in De-
troit. ‘‘That’s all there is to it,’’ he snapped curtly.

steelmakers capitulate to cio in big agreement

Wednesday, March 4. Sort of like a good news, bad news routine.
Seemingly out of the blue, U.S. Steel, reaching its own conclusions
from the General Motors strike, gave in to the CIO’s Steel Workers’
Organizing Committee and signed a huge national agreement rec-
ognizing the union, granting an eight-hour day and a forty-hour
week, and raising wages by 10 percent. It was stunning news, a huge

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 Girl Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big
and total victory for the CIO. And it bumped the Woolworth story
out of the papers altogether.
But that same Wednesday, Woolworth’s, in its first concession,
granted a wage increase to thirty-five women who worked in the
restaurant of one of its Boston stores. Some full-time workers got
free meals ‘‘for the first time in the store’s history.’’ With delicious
obsequiousness, Woolworth’s managers first told the women of the
increases, then begged, ‘‘Remember, now, no sit-down strike.’’

negotiations begin in store stay-ins

Then, finally, the company began to cave. On Wednesday night,
Woolworth’s executives met for the first time in negotiations with
the Detroit Woolworth’s unions. They parleyed again on Thursday,
in the office of Frank Bostroff, secretary of the Michigan Restau-
ranteurs’ Association, who served as mediator. On the workers’ side
were Louis Koenig, from the waiters’ and waitresses’ union, Louis
Walters, from the cooks’, and Louis Salter, from the retail clerks’.
Women’s Wear Daily reported that the identity of the Woolworth’s
representatives had ‘‘been guarded closely since they came to De-
troit,’’ but that ‘‘it is understood that they are vice presidents in
charge of operation from the New York City office.’’ The men were
eventually revealed to be A. F. Weber, superintendent of the Mid-
west region, and John R. Powers and H. W. Frank, the rumored vice
presidents. The choice of representatives is telling on both sides.
Woolworth’s thought that this strike was important enough to send
in big shots from New York, while the women whose action had
forced them to do that didn’t even get to be present at the discus-
sions negotiating their own strike settlement.
All day, contradictory rumors flew about as to the progress of the
negotiations. One report confided that Woolworth’s was ‘‘known to
favor a settlement before the end of the week.’’ Another cited ‘‘reli-
able sources’’ as saying that the company was ‘‘willing to grant prac-
tically all of the wage demands of the strikers, but is considering the

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 Dana Frank
possible effect on other stores throughout the country before mak-
ing [a] decision’’—that is, they too were worried about the ripple ef-
fect, especially, rumor had it, a settlement’s effect on the retail
clerks’ union.
Friday morning, Women’s Wear Daily reported that ‘‘observers
who were inclined to the belief that an early settlement would be
reached when negotiations started are less optimistic today.’’

strike at dime stores ends with big wage boost

All day Friday they talked. Then, at 5:30 p.m. on Friday, March 5,
the strike’s seventh day, just in time to avert Koenig’s Saturday dead-
line for expanding the strike and to avoid the boycott in New
York, Woolworth’s and the unions announced they had reached an
agreement.
No question, it was an absolute and clear-cut victory for the
strikers. They won an entire laundry list of demands, including the
laundry. First, the company agreed to a five-cent an hour increase
for all female employees—a 20 to 25 percent raise, depending on
each woman’s previous rate. New employees would start at $14.50
a week for the first six months. Everyone would get time and a half
for overtime, after a forty-eight-hour work week. Future workers
would be hired through the unions’ offices. Uniforms would be fur-
nished and laundered by the company for free. The vacation sched-
ule would stay the same. Notices of union meetings could be posted
on bulletin boards in the women’s locker room and bathrooms. And,
most amazing of all, the women would be paid at 50 percent of their
usual rate for the time they were occupying the store (though not,
presumably, for twenty-four-hour days). Without ever striking, the
cooks (who were all male) also got a wage increase and shorter
working hours. Moreover, the agreement covered not just the two
stores that had been taken over, but all forty Woolworth’s stores in
the city.
Woolworth’s got almost nothing in return, just a little clause say-
ing union employees couldn’t coerce nonunion coworkers. It did its

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 Girl Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big
feeble best to look strong. ‘‘The increase in salaries granted to em-
ployees in the two Woolworth stores which had sit-down strikes is
not to be store-wide,’’ its executives insisted. In a classic pitch for
containment, they declared that ‘‘each district is operated in accor-
dance with conditions prevailing in that particular sector, and all
matters of policy are determined by the regional supervisor.’’
Needless to say, once the strikers heard of the agreement, they
were ecstatic. The women from the second store quickly packed
up their things and rushed down to the main store. Then all the
women ‘‘sang and cheered Vita Terrall, the strike leader, until 8:30,
the evacuation deadline.’’ In between they posed for photographers
on the big main staircase, holding up giant cardboard letters on
sticks that spelled out ‘‘we won.’’ Over a thousand people—
friends, family, ‘‘curious onlookers’’—jammed the sidewalks out-
side, cheering and clapping. ‘‘The women then marched by twos
carrying their grips and bedding,’’ waving American flags and sing-
ing, reported the Detroit Free Press, in a ‘‘victory parade’’ down to
the Lindbergh Room at the Barlum Hotel. Along the way more on-
lookers cheered and applauded. Once they were all in the room,
Koenig read the agreement out loud to the strikers and he and Wal-
ters and Salter signed it officially. (None of the striking women got
to vote to approve the agreement, or to sign it.) Then an array of
speakers stepped forth to congratulate them, including Frances
Comfort from the schoolteachers’ union, who’d addressed the strik-
ers on their very first day, and Larry Davidow, a lawyer for the
UAW. It was a great moment.
On Saturday Woolworth’s announced a special sale.

strike sentiment rampant;

chain store organization flourishes;
babs renounces citizenship but not profits
We don’t know what the women did next. But we do know that in
the aftermath of their victory its ripple effects swept through the
nation’s stores and restaurants for over a year.

[ 111 ]
 Dana Frank
The first wave engulfed Detroit. Clerks at the twelve-story
Crowley-Milner department store downtown sat down, and after
three days won a wage raise, the five-day, forty-hour week, and
union recognition. Workers at Federated Department Stores won
in a few hours. At Lerner’s, it took three days, and by the end of the
week three shoe stores had joined in too. Those were just the big
shops. ‘‘I would be in the local union office and a girl would call up
suddenly,’’ Mira Komaroff recalled, ‘‘saying ‘say, is this Myra? [sic]
Someone told me to call you. I’m Mamie, over in Liggett’s Drug
Store. We threw out the manager, chased out the customers and
closed up the place. We are ‘‘sitting in.’’ What should we do now?’ ’’
By the middle of March, other Mamies all over the country
were sitting down in the wake of the Woolworth’s victory. In New
York, workers struck five H. L. Green department stores on March
13. Then the retail clerks’ union, just as they had hinted the week
before, took on Woolworth’s. This time the situation got much dic-
ier. On March 17, forty of seventy workers at the store on 34th
Street declared a sit-down strike, but in this case the remaining
clerks kept working, so the managers soon reopened the store to
customers. Undaunted, ‘‘throughout the day, at regular intervals,
the strikers snake-danced through the store, chanting ‘We’re on
strike.’ ’’ When the managers locked the doors at the end of the day,
the women stayed in for the night. To sneak in food and bedding,
their allies made a human chain to haul it all up through a second-
story window. On the second day police evicted the strikers, but
they marched right back in again, and this time took up their usual
positions behind the counters and just stood there, not speaking or
helping customers. Arrests, skirmishes, and picketing multiplied
for days, until finally Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia agreed to mediate.
The strikers won a six-month contract granting union recognition,
wage increases, a grievance system, time and a half for overtime,
and vacations with pay—for all twenty-five hundred Woolworth’s
workers in the city.
These New York strikers were directly inspired by their Detroit

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 Girl Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big
sisters. ‘‘detroit strikers win!! . . . we can win too! join the
union,’’ a leaflet passed out before the strike exhorted. May
Brooks, a Communist organizer at the time, captured wonderfully
in an oral history both the improvisational character of the sit-
downs that erupted in New York and the importance of Detroit and
other precedents: ‘‘So there we were, and we didn’t know what we
were going to do, once we blew the whistle—you know, what to ex-
pect and with no experience—just feeling this was . . . the tactic
now, and . . . this could work. And of course, we’d read and heard
about other sit-down strikes that were beginning to take place . . .
and were tremendous.’’
The New Yorkers were even quicker than the Detroit women to
drag in poor Barbara Hutton. In one clever organizing leaflet dis-
tributed before the New York strike, activists told the mythical
story of ‘‘Little Barbara Button’’ who worked at the ‘‘Millworks’’
store at ‘‘35th and Wiseway.’’ They devised even better slogans—
‘‘Barbara Hutton eats good mutton. Woolworth workers they get
nuttin’ ’’—and even appealed directly to the heiress herself in a tele-
gram sent during the strike. Alas, Hutton, having recently pur-
chased a set of emeralds for $1.2 million, was off on a sightseeing
tour in the Sahara atop a camel and never responded. Allegedly her
new husband pocketed the missive when it arrived and she never
saw it.
In December, the ‘‘Babs vs. Woolworth girls’’ plot thickened.
That fall, the retail clerks’ union in New York went on to achieve
success after success, organizing five thousand new workers by the
year’s end. But when the Woolworth’s contract expired at the end of
October, the company refused to renew it. Smack in the middle of
increasing publicity about the situation, on December 15 Barbara
Hutton Mdivani Haugwitz-Reventlow sailed into New York harbor
and stopped in town just long enough to sign papers renouncing her
American citizenship so she could save $400,000 a year in taxes (she
had gained Danish citizenship automatically when she married
Reventlow). Barbara’s public image plummeted to an all-time low.

[ 113 ]
 Dana Frank
The press was relentless. ‘‘The shopgirls . . . have been contribut-
ing their mites toward [Barbara’s] income of $2,000,000 a year,’’
charged Scripps-Howard columnist Westbrook Pegler, ‘‘without
which their own ‘princess’ might never have aroused the love of her
ideal. Now she has betrayed them for all time.’’
Woolworth’s activists played it to the hilt, launching a new
strike three days later. Workers and their allies paraded up and
down sidewalks all over town wearing sandwich boards: ‘‘babs re-
nounces citizenship but not profits.’’ ‘‘while we strike
for higher pay, babs takes her money and runs away.’’
Once again, they telegrammed Barbara: ‘‘urge that you order
management to concede a living wage to thousands
now existing on starvation wages.’’ She never responded,
but Woolworth’s executives settled the strike after its first day. As
of July 1938, Life was still haunting Barbara. It ran a photo of
her ‘‘wearing richly embroidered Oriental beach pajamas,’’ with the
admonition, ‘‘She should forget counts who spend her money and
remember the Woolworth girls who earn it.’’
These organizing successes in New York and Detroit were only
a few examples of a nationwide uprising of store clerks that year.
Frances Comfort, the Detroit teacher, had been right: the strikers
had indeed been fighting not only for themselves but for thousands
like themselves all over the country. ‘‘The situation in Detroit has
thoroughly aroused the salespeople everywhere,’’ wrote the retail
clerks’ national magazine in April. ‘‘Retail management is finally
aroused to a fuller sense of responsibility and realization that em-
ployees are people, not merely groups of automatons, to be herded
and managed without regard to human rights and ambitions.’’ The
next month they put it even better: ‘‘Since the action of the Detroit
employees in February, Woolworth and other variety store employ-
ees in a number of cities are rebelling against the inhibitions of en-
forced paternalism that these employers have used in the past to
keep their employees loyal to the firm instead of loyal to themselves
and fellow workers.’’

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 Girl Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big
In the third week of March 1937, picketing in East St. Louis pro-
duced a single union contract covering workers at Woolworth’s,
Grant’s, Newberry’s, and Kresge stores across the entire city, and
a brief strike won a union and increases for workers at four chains
in Akron, Ohio. In May, workers in St. Louis got a contract cov-
ering fifteen hundred workers at thirty-three Woolworth’s stores.
That summer victories proliferated like glorious poppies across the
national landscape, spreading from variety stores to grocery store
chains to department stores—in St. Paul, Minnesota; in Centralia,
Washington; in Superior, Wisconson. By the year’s end Tacoma, San
Francisco, and Duluth had joined the list, along with Seattle, where
three thousand clerks in twenty-three stores, including Sears, J. C.
Penney, Frederick & Nelson’s, the Bon Marche, and Lerner’s, won
not only the forty-hour week but a pay increase ‘‘estimated to in-
crease the income of the employees by at least one half-million dol-
lars.’’ Over sixty years later, unions today in department stores all
over the country owe their existence in part to the Woolworth
strike.
Last but not least, the Woolworth strike lived on in popular cul-
ture. Pins and Needles, a new Broadway musical, opened in Novem-
ber of 1938 with a catchy tune, ‘‘Chain Store Daisy,’’ about the
grievances of a Vassar student laboring at a department store. Two
years later, Jean Arthur, Charles Coburn, and Robert Cummings
starred in the screwball comedy The Devil and Miss Jones, which
featured a mean department store owner who goes underground as
a salesclerk to break a union at his own store, but, when a strike
breaks out, ends up converted to the workers’ cause.

david triumphs over goliath in stunning upset

All this from a hundred and eight very young, entirely ordinary
young women who one day in Detroit decided to stage a sit-down.
That was the brilliance of it—it wasn’t some mythical superheroes
who had pulled it off, but regular young women with no experience
of striking, let alone of occupying a major chain store twenty-four

[ 115 ]
 Dana Frank
hours a day for seven long days. They took on one of the biggest cor-
porate powers of their time and won big, inspiring hundreds of
thousands of other ordinary salesclerks—and who knows who
else—to stand up (or sit down) for their rights, to claim a living
wage, to demand an end to corporate paternalism, and to insist they
were indeed live and vibrant human beings, not change-making
machines. They danced and made up songs and did each others’
nails and slid down bannisters precisely because they were alive
and knew it and wanted more from life than fifty-four hours a week
of subservience in painful shoes. And they taught the arrogant
Woolworth’s corporation an enormous lesson.
In retrospect, what they did looks simple, almost easy. But they
could easily have lost, and they won because they had an enormous
array of powers behind them: the example of the General Motors
workers, the force of public opinion, neutrality from the mayor and
governor, spectacular solidarity from thousands of allies, and, best
of all, their own sense of audacity, of fun, and of faith in themselves.
What’s the lesson? With enough allies, with enough inspiration,
and with enough daring, anything can happen.

epilogue
Louis Koenig, a.k.a. ‘‘Smiley,’’ stayed on as secretary-treasurer of
Local 705, the Detroit waiters’ and waitresses’ union. He retired in
1960 at the age of seventy-two and spent the rest of his life at a nurs-
ing home in Florida.
Mira Komaroff stayed on at Local 705 too, first as recording sec-
retary and then, after Koenig retired in 1960, inheriting his job as
secretary-treasurer. In 1939 she married and changed her name to
Myra Wolfgang. She went on to become an international vice presi-
dent of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees’ International Union
in 1952 and a pioneer woman leader in the AFL-CIO, fighting for
equal pay and the minimum wage, and helping to found CLUW, the
Coalition of Labor Union Women, in 1974. She died of a brain tu-
mor in 1976, a month before her sixty-second birthday.

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 Girl Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big
Floyd Loew was purged from the local in 1943, after he refused
to cooperate with Koenig and Komaroff/ Wolfgang and cross a
picket line during a strike at Harper Hospital in Detroit. He re-
mained active as a dissident rank-and-file activist in HERE for the
rest of his life, in Florida, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. He died in
the mid-1990s.
Paul Domeney, the Hungarian waiter, and Mary Davis, the
union waitress, who both visited the picket line during the Wool-
worth’s strike, were purged from Local 705 in the fall of 1938, for
advocating rank-and-file participation in contract negotiations, the
right of rank-and-filers to vote on ratification of their own contracts,
and one unified union of all restaurant workers. Domeney lost his
job at the Book-Cadillac Hotel as a result, and was blacklisted from
work in the city’s hotels and restaurants. In 1940 he founded an in-
dependent union of Detroit restaurant workers, Local 1064, affili-
ated with the CIO, which survives to this day. He retired to Florida
in 1999 at the age of ninety. Mary Davis is still thriving as an inde-
pendent activist for social justice in Detroit.
In April, 1937, Governor Frank Murphy and other officials
cracked down on sit-down strikes in Detroit. Throughout the na-
tion, state and local governments moved swiftly to restore private
property rights at the point of a gun, ending the sit-down wave. But
the Congress of Industrial Organizations nonetheless went on to
greater and greater victories throughout the late 1930s and the
1940s. By 1948 it represented almost four and a half million workers
in industries all over the country. In 1955, the CIO merged with the
AFL to form the AFL-CIO.
The Woolworth Corporation continued to expand during the
1940s and 1950s. In February of 1960, a new wave of young people
launched sit-ins at its stores throughout the South to protest the
chain’s refusal to serve African Americans at its lunch counters.
Protesters joined them to picket Woolworth’s stores throughout the
country. The chain finally agreed to serve African Americans, and
eventually hired them to work in its stores as well.

[ 117 ]
 Dana Frank
Although the Woolworth Corporation acquired new subchains
such as Foot Locker and Kinney Shoes and grew to 6,700 stores by
1996, the company failed to keep up with new megastores such as
Wal-Mart and Costco in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1997 it reorga-
nized itself as the Venator Corporation and closed all its Wool-
worth’s stores throughout the United States. With the exception of
two boxes of photographs of the Woolworth Building, all its records
are destroyed or lost, and Woolworth’s no longer exists.
Barbara Hutton divorced Kurt Haugwitz-Reventlow in 1941
and went on to marry five more times, to Cary Grant, Prince Igor
Troubetzkoy, Porfirio Rubirosa, Baron Gottfried Von Cramm, and
Prince Raymond Doan Vinh Na Champassak. She died of anorexia
in 1979, at the age of sixty-six.
The Hotel and Restaurant Employees’ International Union, of
which Detroit Local 705 was part, became one of the most progres-
sive and dynamic unions in the country, winning organizing drives
in the 1980s and 1990s at Yale University, Las Vegas casinos, and
hotels throughout downtown Los Angeles. In 2001 it represents
250,000 workers and is known for its commitment to union democ-
racy, interracial solidarity, and worker militance.
The Detroit Woolworth’s workers lost their union contract when
it came up for renewal in October of 1937. As individual women left
the store, management deliberately replaced them with anti-union
workers, who didn’t then fight to keep the union.
The names of the strikers themselves are lost to the historical
record, and we don’t know what they did with the rest of their lives.
Some of them, presumably, Got Their Man and Held Him. Some of
them didn’t. Some of them did other things altogether.

[ 118 ]
 ROBIN D. G. KELLEY
~~~~~
Without a Song:
New York Musicians Strike Out
against Technology
This page intentionally left blank
 prelude: ‘‘smoke gets in your eyes’’
On the evening of Saturday, October 10, 1936, a near capacity
crowd of one thousand packed into the Times Square Theater, a
second-run cinema located on West 42nd Street near Broadway.
Around 9:30, an explosion erupted from the vicinity of the empty
orchestra pit. The sound was incredibly loud but staccato, like a pis-
tol being fired. Some ducked for cover; the curious peeked over
their seats to see what the commotion was about. Within seconds, a
rumor began to circulate in one section of the theater that a man
had just committed suicide. But before the story made its rounds,
moviegoers sitting toward the front began coughing and wheezing,
their eyes began to tear, and some were overcome with nausea. This
was no gunshot; someone had detonated a homemade tear gas
bomb. A few panicked and made a mad rush for the exit, leaving be-
hind coats and hats despite the chilly air of the autumn night. Then
cooler heads prevailed as ushers prepared the way for an orderly de-
parture. By the time police arrived, the sidewalk was jam-packed
with angry, teary-eyed moviegoers demanding a refund or a rain
check.
Martin Levine, the theater’s general manager, was just as

[ 121 ]
 Robin D.G. Kelley
shocked by the bombing as the audience. While acknowledging
past labor troubles, he insisted that he was unaware of any current
disputes that might have brought on such an act. Apparently Levine
had forgotten about the mass picketing campaign led by Local 802
of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) against theaters
for firing their in-house musicians with the advent of sound pic-
tures. The campaign was exactly one month old on October 10,
1936, and the AFM had been trying to sustain picket lines at most
major theaters in Manhattan as well as in Brooklyn and Queens.
But there were no pickets at the Times Square Theater that night,
and no one—not even the police—suspected the musicians in any
case.
They were right. Less than three weeks later, on the evening of
October 29, the movie bombers struck again. The culprits turned
out to be projectionists affiliated with Local 306 of the Motion Pic-
ture Operators Union, whose members had been replaced by the
Allied Motion Picture Operators Union—a ‘‘company union’’ con-
trolled by the Independent Theater Owners Association (ITOA).
Local 306 had locked horns with ITOA earlier in the decade, and
this was not the first time they had turned to sabotage. During the
spring and summer of 1934, renegade members had used tear gas
and stink bombs in what had been known in the press as ‘‘the movie
wars.’’* But the action of October 29 proved far more serious than
anything they had done before. Eight theaters were bombed simul-
taneously—four in the Times Square area, and the remaining four
in other parts of Manhattan and in Brooklyn and Queens. Some

*The battle between the projectionists and the theater owners really began around
1930, with the elimination of the disc system. The newer Photophone system re-
quired less skill and fewer workers. In the past, projectionists had assistants who
helped them handle the sound discs and adjust sound levels, and because break-
downs were frequent, an ability to maintain and repair projectors was a require-
ment. Under the new system breakdowns were less frequent and projectionists no
longer had to deal with cue sheets indicating when to change fader settings since
sound levels were now uniform. Their primary task, then, was to load and unload
the reels. As a result of this rapid deskilling of the job, projectionists were forced to
accept a 25 percent pay cut over two years beginning in 1930.

[ 122 ]
 Without a Song
thirteen thousand patrons were forced to evacuate and at least
sixty-two received injuries requiring medical attention. This time
the bombs were made with soda bottles and thrown under the seats,
sending glass shards everywhere. The lacerations caused by flying
glass were worse than the noxious fumes that filled the theaters.
The next day police raided the headquarters of Local 306, ar-
resting thirty-two people and seizing books and other material ev-
idence. Altogether, they deployed well over two hundred plain-
clothes officers in theaters throughout the city and clamped down
on any protest activity in their vicinity. Nevertheless, the bombings
continued until the middle of November, when Mayor LaGuardia
and a special committee intervened, stepping in to negotiate a set-
tlement between the ITOA and Local 306. The final agreement fa-
vored the Motion Picture Operators Union, the biggest concession
being the dismantling of the ITOA’s company union, whose mem-
bers were to be absorbed into Local 306.
The projectionists’ dramatic victory cast a long shadow over the
musicians’ efforts to ‘‘bring back flesh’’ to the theater. The fact that
neither the theater owners nor the police seemed cognizant of the
AFM’s grievances as a ‘‘labor dispute,’’ let alone suspected for a
minute that they might have been behind any of the bombings,
speaks to the musicians’ lack of visibility. Their struggle to return
live musicians to movie theaters had been going on for about a de-
cade, and AFM leaders were convinced that audiences wanted the
same. As the union’s latest campaign began that October, the AFM’s
main organ, International Musician, carried an editorial claiming
that ‘‘every poll and every straw vote has always favored the reten-
tion or return of Flesh as the case may be and yet nothing is ever
done about it.’’ A dispirited and hyperbolic rant, to be sure, for the
picket lines were easily ignored by a modern world anxious to check
out the latest Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers flick. Besides, the
New York musicians did little more than parade, picket, and propa-
gandize to bring attention to their struggle. In the age of sit-down
strikes and sabotage, Local 802 never promoted civil disobedience;

[ 123 ]
 Robin D.G. Kelley
there were no clarinetists taking over projection booths, or trom-
bonists emptying spit valves over huge vats of popcorn, or whole en-
sembles blocking the screen with renditions of ‘‘Nice Work If You
Can Get It.’’ And there were no significant acts of solidarity be-
tween the AFM and any other unions besides actors’ and stage-
hands’ organizations.
But there is a story here, an incredibly important one at that.
Embedded in this unremarkable campaign is the tale of what hap-
pens when working-class consumption of popular culture overrides
the interests or concerns of popular culture workers, in this case,
theater musicians. We might go one step further and say it’s a story
about the limits of solidarity—limits set by employees who are not
seen or do not see themselves as ‘‘workers,’’ and by working-class
consumers whose own self-interest may actually clash with the de-
mands of laboring artists. Finally, and most fundamentally, this is a
story about technology and workers’ control, and how utterly ill-
equipped the union was to deal with the transformation of the work
of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Through the AFM
‘‘strike’’ of theaters in 1936, we will better understand the collision
between technology and art, work and play, past and future. Grab
your popcorn, make yourself comfortable, and leave your blue-
collar visions at the theater door.

‘‘playing in the dark’’

Musicians are rarely thought of as workers. Instead, we tend to see
them as entertainers and, more often than not, powerful celebrities
rather than wage laborers. Or we tend to think of musicians as en-
gaged in ‘‘play’’ rather than work. And yet, if we think about the
work of making music and the context in which this work takes
place, we cannot help but acknowledge the myriad ways musicians
are affected by the whims and caprices of capital, the routinization
of labor, and the often dehumanizing conditions of production. On
the other hand, musicians are not just another group of skilled wage

[ 124 ]
 Without a Song
laborers. They straddle class lines and historically possess a kind of
cultural authority that may belie their material class position.
Throughout the nineteenth century, most Western musicians
thought of themselves as an elite group of artists, and they em-
braced a hierarchy of musical culture that distinguished ‘‘refined’’
music from folk or vernacular idioms. Furthermore, musicians are
not considered workers because they do not work, they perform.
They produce art, and as such, their work is often also a conscious
act of self-expression. In some instances, their self-expression may
come into conflict with the goals of their employers. As creative la-
boring artists, they could be fired not only for incompetence but
also for innovation. Indeed, one of the central roles of a musicians’
union is to arbitrate such disputes between musicians and employ-
ers (bandleaders, club owners, etc.).
By the turn of the century the situation had changed slightly.
The increasing commercialization of music and the changing and
expanding market generated new opportunities for folk and ‘‘popu-
lar’’ musicians. The National League of Musicians (NLM) had been
the dominant protective organization in the late nineteenth cen-
tury, and its president, Owen Miller, understood that new employ-
ment opportunities in the industrial age required a new type of bar-
gaining unit. He sought to make the NLM more like a trade union
and to affiliate with the American Federation of Labor, but many
members resisted, causing Miller and his more labor-oriented col-
leagues to form the American Federation of Musicians in 1900.
The AFM’s first president and undisputed leader was a thirty-
seven-year-old clarinetist named Joseph Weber. Born in a small vil-
lage in the old Austro-Hungarian empire, Weber had immigrated to
New York with his family at the age of fourteen. He learned mu-
sic from his father, who worked on and off as a musician, and by his
late teens he was playing professionally in a touring band. In 1891,
he married violinist Gisela Liebholdt and continued to perform
throughout the western United States. He also joined the NLM,

[ 125 ]
 Robin D.G. Kelley
serving as vice president of the Seattle local and a principal orga-
nizer for Local 26 in Denver. In 1895, he moved to Cincinnati,
where he took up the presidency of Local 3 of the Musicians Protec-
tive Union. After achieving the presidency of the AFM, Weber held
on to the post for forty years. Part of his popularity stemmed from
his recognition that musicians were, indeed, workers and needed to
defend themselves against exploitation. ‘‘We musicians are em-
ployed under the same conditions of any other workers,’’ Weber ex-
plained. ‘‘We may be artists, but we still work for wages. . . . [We]
are exploited by our employers in the same manner as any other
wage-earners who stand alone. Therefore we must organize, coop-
erate and become active in the economic field like other workers.’’
The AFM was founded during a time of increased employment
opportunities for musicians, partly the result of the emergence of
cinema. By 1910, some ten thousand theaters across the nation
showed silent films as their core entertainment, and they all re-
quired musicians to provide a ‘‘soundtrack’’ and to perform be-
tween reels. The proliferation of movie houses generated a ten-fold
increase in the number of musicians employed in theaters. By 1926,
about twenty-two thousand musicians were working in theater pits
across the country, comprising about one-fifth of the total member-
ship of the AFM. Two years later, New York City theaters alone em-
ployed over three thousand musicians.
In the early days of silent cinema, theatergoers were treated to
what amounted to a two-hour variety show: newsreels, vaudeville
acts (including blackface minstrel performances), and a feature
film. (In some cases in order to fit all the performances into the time
allotted, projectionists might speed up a film.) What musicians
played to accompany films varied, as did the size of the band—
which could range from a fifteen-piece orchestra to a single organ-
ist. The bigger houses maintained a library of sheet music to draw
on, and sometimes debates arose between bandleaders and theater
owners over what was appropriate. The failure or success of musical
accompaniment became a major issue in the trade magazines. As

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one theater owner advised in Moving Picture World (October 30,
1909), ‘‘Get a good piano player, who can read any music at sight and
make him or her attend strictly to business. . . . Often and often
have I entered a theater while the film was running and seen the pi-
ano player industriously engaged in talking to a friend, dividing her
attention impartially between the friend and a wad of gum.’’
Of greater concern was whether or not the music seemed appro-
priate to the action on the screen. Some African American bands
were notorious for subverting a film by engaging in playful musi-
cal signifying that would have horrified studio executives. Black
columnist Dave Peyton, critic for the Chicago Defender, attacked
these moments of musical levity as unbecoming of the race. Speak-
ing of his experiences in black theaters, he observed, ‘‘During a
death scene . . . you are likely to hear the orchestra jazzing away on
‘Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie.’ . . . There is entirely too much
‘hokum’ played in our Race picture houses. It only appeals to a cer-
tain riff-raff element who loudly clap hands when the orchestra
stops, misleading the leader to believe that his efforts are winning
the approval of the entire audience.’’
Of course, black theater musicians had no monopoly on ‘‘ho-
kum,’’ but they did tend to play a more important role in the overall
makeup of a show. In some cases, audiences were drawn to the the-
ater more for the band than for the movie itself. In Harlem during
the teens, theatergoers lined up outside the Lafayette to hear Hallie
Anderson’s all-female band, or they might catch her at Harlem’s
Douglas Theater, where she was the house organist. Fats Waller was
legendary for his film accompaniments. Fellow pianist Mary Lou
Williams remembers how the audience responded: ‘‘He was just a
sensation in New York, when they’d turn the light on people would
scream, when he sat down, people would scream: I never saw such a
thing. When he finished, that was the end; they had to let it cool off.’’
Given these kinds of subversions, is it any wonder that studios
and theaters attempted to standardize musical accompaniment?
Some movie houses turned to piano rolls, and in 1910 Wurlitzer and

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 Robin D.G. Kelley
J. P. Seeburg introduced special ‘‘automatic’’ keyboards to accom-
pany films, called photoplayers. They contained several rolls of mu-
sic and could play thirty or more songs without repetition—each
chosen to represent a different emotion. An assortment of bells and
horns could be activated for special effect by pulling straps or de-
pressing pedals.
Since few theaters could afford photoplayers, however, and most
needed bands to perform vaudeville numbers, the studios sought to
control musical accompaniment for films in another way, by provid-
ing cue sheets. Cue sheets were musical fragments with precise
time frames and sound effects ‘‘cued’’ to the titles and action on the
screen. Usually prepared by a music editor and distributed with the
film itself, these were not intended to be full musical scores, but
they did provide musical direction. The need for some standard of
accompaniment sparked a cottage industry of guides and collec-
tions of cue sheets, beginning with Gregg A. Frelinger, Motion Pic-
ture Piano Music: Descriptive Music to Fit the Action, Character or
Scene of Moving Pictures (1909), which contained fifty-one short
pieces with functional titles meant to correspond with stock charac-
ters or events on screen. Edith Lang and George West’s Musical Ac-
companiment of Moving Pictures: A Practical Manual for Pianists
and Organists (1920) provided more specific guidelines for musi-
cians, including explicit ideas about how to convey race, ethnicity,
and nature. To support an exotic scene from ‘‘the Orient,’’ for in-
stance, one must play Oriental music. ‘‘As a rule,’’ they advise, ‘‘Ori-
ental music is distinguished rather by a peculiar inflection of the
melody than by variety of harmonic treatment. The latter belongs
to the Occident. Therefore it will often suffice if the player adheres
for his accompaniment to a droning bass or either an open fifth or
fourth or a stereotyped rhythmical figure that is indicative of either
the languor of the scene (opium dens, harems, etc.) or of its typical
movement (Arabian caravans, Oriental dancers, Chinese junks). A
few works may be suggested here, as offering a great deal of useful
material of distinctly Oriental color, such as ‘Scheherazade’ by

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Rimsky-Korsakov . . . the opera ‘Lakme’ by Delibes and the ballet
‘Namouna’ by Lalo . . . the opera ‘Madame Butterfly’ by Puccini,
the piano suites ‘Dreamer’s Tales’ and ‘Betel, Jade and Ivory’ by Pe-
terkin.’’ All of the works selected are by Western composers who
imagine ‘‘the Orient.’’ The same holds true in their advice for ac-
companying what they identified as ‘‘Southern scenes (negro activi-
ties, etc.),’’ for they suggested turning to the songs of Stephen Fos-
ter in order to capture the authentic Negro sensibility.

‘‘how do you keep the music playing?’’

By the late 1920s, the emergence of sound film technology ren-
dered cue sheets and these sorts of manuals obsolete. Now film-
makers and music editors could put their Orientalist fantasies
directly onto a soundtrack without having to worry about the capa-
bilities or dispositions of local musicians. Briefly, Warner Brothers
introduced the first successful sound system, called Vitaphone,
which employed a separate disc synchronized to the film. A year
later, Fox Films introduced Movietone, an improved version of the
Vitaphone system. The disc system proved unsatisfactory, however,
because the discs were bulky and broke easily, they contained vary-
ing levels of surface noise, and they were only good for about twenty
showings. Besides, given the nature of national distribution, the-
ater owners occasionally received the wrong disc. Most of these
problems were solved, however, when Western Electric introduced
the Kinegraphone, better known as the Photophone. By placing the
recording track directly onto the film itself, the Photophone system
improved sound quality, eliminated most problems of synchroniza-
tion, eased editing, and significantly reduced the level of skill re-
quired of projectionists.
When Paramount, MGM, and United Artists decided to adopt
Photophone in 1929, many local theaters across the country were
forced to change their projection system or risk going out of busi-
ness (although there were still Vitaphone and Movietone holdouts
well into the 1930s). And in some cases, the big studios moved in to

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 Robin D.G. Kelley
purchase local theaters to add to their chains. While monopoly and
rapid technological change led to the loss of jobs throughout the
movie industry—all of this synchronized to the stock market crash
and the onset of the Great Depression—the studios did not appear
to be losing profits. Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer (1927)—technically
the second full-length sound film, following Don Juan, which pre-
miered a year earlier—broke all box office records, and Jolson’s next
film, The Singing Fool, did even better. The number of theaters
equipped for sound rose from 157 in 1927 to 13,880 in 1931—rep-
resenting nearly two-thirds of all theaters in the country.
Evidently, theatergoers did not miss ‘‘flesh’’: attendance in-
creased dramatically, from an average of fifty million a week in 1926
to ninety million a week in 1930. The elimination of live musicians
also meant the disappearance of vaudeville, enabling owners to re-
duce admission prices to as little as twenty-five to fifty cents for
double and triple features. And now that the owners no longer had
to abide by union regulations regarding musicians’ hours, they
could show films all day long. Ironically, the Depression conditions
enhanced theater profits as a growing army of jobless people es-
caped the cold, the heat, or their general frustrations by spending
their afternoons at the movies. A random survey revealed that on
one day in 1932 a Washington Heights theater took in $225 in the
afternoon and only $37 in the evening.
Although the new technology was expensive, costing anywhere
between $9,000 and $15,000 for a medium to large movie house,
theater owners easily made up for the expense by firing their live
musicians. Maintaining a fifteen-piece orchestra, for example,
could run to almost $50,000 per year. Beyond saving theater owners
the cost of a band, the transition to sound rationalized film opera-
tions, eliminating problems caused by disputes over song selec-
tions, no-shows, or uneven performances, not to mention out-of-
tune pianos or defective organ pipes. Furthermore, recorded
soundtracks do not go out on strike or demand higher wages. Mak-
ing film music still required musicians’ labor, but production shifted

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from the site of performance to the studio, where Taylorist princi-
ples of rational production were the order of the day.* The studios
erected a sharp division of labor that included a range of full-time
and part-time musicians, arrangers, composers, copyists, and music
librarians. Indeed, the music library of a single studio claimed the
third largest collection of music of any library in the United States,
with holdings of well over eighty thousand compositions. Music
production resembled an assembly line: film composers rarely
oversaw orchestrations or arrangements, and in some cases a pri-
mary composer might turn over his/her basic melodic lines to an-
other composer to be harmonized. While this generated more work
for composers, it stripped them of any control over their work. Stu-
dios owned and controlled everything, and at this point composers
were among the few music workers not unionized.
As production changed, so did the product. According to Leonid
Sabaneev’s Music for the Films, one of the first ‘‘handbooks’’ for
composers and conductors, sound film required ‘‘strict and solid
composition’’ as opposed to the ‘‘mere improvisation’’ characteristic
of the silents, partly in order to coordinate music with speech and
various naturalistic noises. Music for mass production, therefore,
meant mass-produced music. The film composer, Sabaneev warns,
‘‘is hardly ever asked to create anything new, anything of his
own. . . . Little value is attached to a talent for novelty or invention;
in fact it is considered superfluous, and a hindrance rather than oth-
erwise. The level of intelligence of the vast cinema audience is, on
the average, low, and therefore it is useless to astonish it with har-

*Taylorism, or ‘‘scientific management,’’ is a method of organizing production by

separating manual from mental labor and eliminating what is deemed ‘‘unneces-
sary’’ motion in order to enhance efficiency. The result is the routinization and de-
skilling of work. Pioneered by Frederick Winslow Taylor, the basic principle behind
Taylorism is to divide the labor of building/manufacturing a product into separate,
simple tasks that could be executed by unskilled labor. The creative and intellectual
work of design and conception would be placed in the hands of management. Simi-
larly, in the field of film music the creative work of choosing or inventing appropri-
ate music is taken out of the hands of the musicians, who are now either playing se-
lected scores in the theater or recording in studios.

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 Robin D.G. Kelley
monic subtleties, with cunning devices of a purely musical type,
which only a musician could appreciate.’’ So it should come as no
surprise that authority over the recording/performance of the mu-
sic rested not with the bandleaders or musicians themselves but
with program directors and producers. Very few were musicians,
and yet they often selected music, determined length, dynamics,
position and volume of microphones, general sound levels, and in-
strumentation. The program director gave signals to musicians
from inside the control booth—the embodiment of the fact that
control had shifted from the workers in the orchestra pits or on
stage to engineering booths owned and operated by the big studios.
There were hidden racial and gender dimensions, as well, to the
restructuring and rationalizing of film music. While men had cer-
tainly dominated the world of instrumental music in general, there
had been quite a few women pianists and organists working in the-
aters before the transition to ‘‘talkies.’’ The sound revolution elimi-
nated virtually all women from the field, in part because studio
work was limited to a small group of elite instrumentalists. More-
over, film music’s center of creative gravity shifted from the impro-
vising musician to the composer and the musical director—posi-
tions women simply did not occupy. Likewise, very few African
American musicians could obtain studio work in Hollywood before
the 1950s, aside from occasional novelty films featuring figures
such as Duke Ellington or Count Basie. When theaters in black
communities transitioned to sound, it meant replacing black musi-
cians with lily-white studio orchestras whose tightly controlled
scores were not supposed to draw audience attention. One can only
imagine how profoundly the movie-going experience must have
changed in black theaters.
The inequities of race and gender, however, were overshadowed
by the fact that the vast majority of theater musicians lost their jobs
with the transition to sound. Only a relative handful of musicians
were able to secure studio work, and nearly all of them were con-

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centrated in Southern California. In 1930, there were about 14,000
musicians employed in theaters nationwide, already down from
26,000 less than four years earlier. By 1934, the number of theater
musicians had dropped to a paltry 4,100, and the American Federa-
tion of Musicians faced its worst crisis since its inception four de-
cades earlier.

‘‘they can’t take that away from me’’

The first signs of displacement by theater owners generated sharp
resistance from musicians. As early as 1927, musicians employed by
Skouras’s Grand Central Theater in St. Louis successfully fought
management’s plan to lay off its orchestra during a run of Vitaphone
films. Astonishingly, the AFM local negotiated a settlement
whereby the musicians received seven weeks of full salaries for idle
time. The following year, the union picketed the Idlewild Theater
in East St. Louis—also owned by the Skouras brothers—for letting
its orchestra go. Trade unionists throughout the city supported the
musicians by refusing to cross the picket line. When the strike was
finally settled, the Skouras brothers agreed to stop laying off orches-
tras wholesale, and the Grand Central kept on seven musicians who
played two or three minutes between films but were paid at full
scale. At other theaters, musicians were hired to play only about
ninety seconds during each show but paid a weekly salary. These ar-
rangements were short-lived, however; within two years most St.
Louis theater musicians were unemployed.
Throughout the summer and fall of 1928, AFM locals across the
country followed the St. Louis example and tried to fight back. With
strikes erupting in Des Moines, Omaha, Seattle, Chicago, and else-
where in a failed attempt to halt the layoffs, it is not surprising that
the impact of talkies became the main topic of the AFM’s 1928 na-
tional convention, held in Louisville, Kentucky. Some delegates
suggested that theaters raise admission prices in order to continue
paying musicians, others proposed accepting lower wages, and a

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 Robin D.G. Kelley
few supported the radical though problematic demand that the
union ban members from studio recording (which would have de-
nied struggling musicians access to hundreds of new jobs). The pre-
vailing strategy came from AFM president Joseph Weber, and it
was not based on the union principles of worker solidarity. Instead,
he proposed a heavily financed public relations campaign to con-
vince audiences of the superiority of live over ‘‘canned’’ music.
While he was all for scientific progress, he argued that ‘‘art can not
be mechanized’’ and that recorded music ‘‘can not approach the
genuine article. Music is dependent for its quality upon the mood
of the artist. The public will not be allowed to realize this.’’ In other
words, musicians are not simply craftsmen who control their labor,
and it is their mood, their personality, the very act of creating that
makes their vocation special and unique.
Weber paid for the campaign by levying a 2 percent tax on AFM
members, the proceeds of which went directly to a ‘‘Theater De-
fense Fund’’ that soon evolved into the Music Defense League. By
the end of 1928, the first year of the campaign, the union had col-
lected about $1.5 million for the fund. The money was initially used
to take out advertisements in newspapers, magazines, and on bill-
boards. Most were dramatic, like an ad with ‘‘Sick Houses’’ embla-
zoned across the top, implying that theaters were doing poorly
owing to the lack of live music. In ‘‘troublous times,’’ the ad stated,
men and women want ‘‘living music—cheery and glamorous atmo-
sphere, a place to forget cares for the moment,’’ and, ‘‘the all-sound
house does not fit the bill. However worthy its screen shows may be,
such a theatre remains a dark and cheerless spot—likely to become
a sick house.’’ For all of Weber’s protestations that he was not a
Luddite, a few of the ads seemed to directly attack technology. One
read, ‘‘Is His Substitution for Real Music a Success?’’ over a picture
of an iron man ripping out the strings of a harp while a dog howls
and an angel cries. In 1931, the AFM extended its publicity cam-
paign to include ‘‘Living Music Day.’’ Sponsored by union locals
and local businesses, participants held outdoor or free concerts,

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‘‘block dancing in the streets,’’ and parades, all to demonstrate live
performance’s ‘‘superiority over Canned Music.’’
In March of 1929, Weber met with the members of Local 802 in
New York City to discuss his publicity campaign, but local leaders
and rank-and-file members had other ideas. One particular group,
under the auspices of the Musical Mutual Protective Union,
planned a mass march against joblessness and technological dis-
placement, but they were unable to secure a parade permit. Feeling
the brunt of the crisis, members J. M. Camuti and Charles Palizzolo
proposed a set of recommendations that might save jobs and reduce
unemployment. Among other things, they wanted the union to stip-
ulate that orchestras that put in a minimum amount of time not be
fired until the end of the season, and they proposed a sharing of
work by reducing the work week to five days, shortening the work-
day, and distributing jobs more evenly. ‘‘The work [ought] to be con-
trolled by the Union and divided equally and not with favoritism.’’
Specifically, they called for rules against union members having
more than one job, doubling on more than one instrument, and
working on Movietone or Vitaphone productions for more than
three hours per day. If a company needed more than three hours of
work, they would have to hire another orchestra.
A committee of ten was formed to develop these ideas and by
May they produced a comprehensive resolution calling for the ne-
gotiation of new wage scales with the Theater Managers Associa-
tion, rules regarding the minimum number of musicians theaters
must keep employed, and a four-week clause stipulating that bands
providing satisfactory work for that amount of time could not be
fired until the season ended. They also demanded that the price of
‘‘canned music’’ in any of its manifestations be increased by 25 per-
cent, the proceeds to go to a local relief fund for musicians, and in-
sisted on collecting royalties ‘‘for every synchronized picture in all
theatres,’’ monies that would also go to the relief fund. Finally, in
an effort to get a handle on competition from musicians migrating
to New York City, the resolution raised Local 802’s initiation fee

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 Robin D.G. Kelley
to $100 and limited new members to twenty per month. And, of
course, the local promised to support the publicity efforts of the
Music Defense League.
Local 802 was not able to enforce any of the demands they made
on the theater owners, and conditions only got worse with the deep-
ening of the Depression nationwide. Even the film industry suf-
fered major financial losses: Warner Brothers reportedly lost some
$8 million in 1931, then $14 million the following year. According
to Paramount’s executives, their losses compelled them to lay off
five thousand employees. In response, the AFM’s national leader-
ship proposed a staggered system of employment in those theaters
that still used musicians, whereby unemployed musicians would re-
place those with jobs one out of four weeks. Weber saw this as a way
of sharing jobs without wage reductions or costs to the theater. The
plan could be carried out at the employers’ discretion so long as an
equal number of musicians could work for at least one week out of
four; the musician holding the regular gig could not then take
someone else’s job for a week as part of the staggering system since
this would defeat the whole purpose of the plan.
Within Local 802, a huge debate erupted over the ‘‘spread-the-
work’’ campaign, drawing opposition from both leaders and the
rank and file. Local vice president William Feinberg submitted a
report critical of the plan, arguing that assigning one job to two or
three people amounted to ‘‘a coolie wage for all.’’ It never really
worked in New York, although there were various proposals for
modified spread-the-work plans, including one in which the em-
ployer would pay a 50 percent ‘‘standby’’ fee to the union for musi-
cians deemed indispensable. In other words, the musicians in de-
mand would be paid 50 percent above scale, the difference to be
paid to the union. The intended effect would be more work for
other musicians, if an employer did not want to pay the additional
fee, and/or more money for the union’s relief efforts. An interesting
idea to be sure, for it implies that the employers, not the musicians,

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should bear the responsibility for ameliorating the hardship caused
by the decline in the number of available jobs.
Supporters of the plan argued that some musicians profited over
others not only by their personal connections but by their associa-
tion with certain bands, certain record labels, and certain types of
music (i.e., symphonies vs. jazz). The result, they complained, was
inequality—and some union members had two jobs while others
‘‘of equal competence are entirely unemployed.’’ But there were
problems in defining competence and assessing differing skill lev-
els between musicians. Indeed, the biggest complaint about the
spread-the-work campaign was that it resulted in uneven bands and
orchestras. Besides, it never solved the immediate problem: musi-
cians needed more work.
Since Local 802 could not create more jobs, its leaders focused
their energies on providing relief for its members. Beginning in
1934, the year America was hit with a massive nationwide wave of
strikes in over a dozen industries, the year when Depression-era
class warfare had probably reached its peak, Local 802 approached
New York’s bourgeoisie with hat in hand. The city’s elite, many of
whom owned or invested in those industries being struck, were
more than happy to do their part for musicians, for they found it
simply appalling that so many ‘‘worthy artists’’ had to struggle like
ordinary blue-collar laborers.
Under the leadership of Dr. Walter Damrosch and the extraor-
dinarily wealthy philanthropist/patron of the arts Mrs. Vincent As-
tor, a Musicians’ Emergency Fund was created to raise $400,000 for
relief. At the time, Damrosch was one of the most prominent and
visible men in the world of music. A German emigré who had lived
in the United States since 1871, Damrosch had the distinction of
conducting the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic
Society, and the Symphony Society, and of having composed major
choral works and operas, including The Scarlet Letter and The Man
Without a Country. Especially noteworthy, however, is his check-

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 Robin D.G. Kelley
ered history with musicians’ unions. Just one year after his brother
Frank, a prominent left-wing conductor and teacher, founded the
working-class-based People’s Choral Union in 1892, Walter Dam-
rosch was fined by the NLM for hiring Danish cellist Anton Hegner
for the New York Symphony Society without first advertising for
and auditioning American musicians. The NLM had established
strict rules against ‘‘importing’’ musicians from outside the country.
To protest Hegner’s hiring, the entire orchestra refused to play,
generating what was probably the first strike by an American or-
chestra. In 1905, Damrosch was fined again for a similar violation,
this time by the AFM. Moreover, in 1927, while the AFM locked
horns with the big radio networks, he had accepted an appointment
as musical adviser to NBC. Nevertheless, in the end Damrosch
sympathized with struggling musicians even if he wasn’t the most
union-oriented person.
The money raised by the Musicians’ Emergency Fund assisted
about four thousand musicians by defraying medical costs, staving
off evictions, helping with groceries, and protecting artists from
having to sell off their instruments. Mayor LaGuardia enthusiasti-
cally supported the campaign, declaring the week of December 10
through 17 ‘‘Musicians’ Week.’’ The highlights of the campaign in-
cluded a fundraising auction held at Jascha Heifetz’s penthouse
apartment at 247 Park Avenue. Like Damrosch, the Russian-born
Heifetz was a huge celebrity in the music world, developing a repu-
tation as one of the greatest violinists in the world. Selling off items
ranging from a miniature silver violin to a pair of jeweled cufflinks,
the auction brought in a grand total of $4,366.*
Meanwhile, as Local 802 sought to build public support for live
music and helped the city’s elite do its charity work for the arts, the
very theaters that had laid off musicians began to blow up—literally.
Recall that 1934 was also the year that renegade members of Local

*The relief campaign continued the following year, but in 1935 the union also
turned to the WPA for assistance. However, because WPA projects paid below
standard union wages, Local 802 spent a good deal of time picketing their offices.

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 Without a Song
306 of the Motion Picture Operators Union began planting stink
bombs in theaters that had locked their members out. Interestingly,
union records are virtually silent on the bombings and the local’s
leaders were never called upon to make a statement. Nevertheless,
the wave of police repression that came down on the operators’
union probably had a chilling effect on any talk within the AFM of
militant action directed at theaters. In fact, the bombings prompted
the city to temporarily ban mass picketing in front of theaters. Any-
one barring the entrance or exit of a theater could be arrested. But
it was not enough to put a stop to the bombings. Indeed, as we have
seen already, the militant bombers of operators’ Local 306 would
provide the background noise for the musicians’ strike against the
theaters in 1936—for better or for worse.

interlude: ‘‘until the real thing comes along’’

Patience, dear reader. I know you are anxious to get to the strike, but
in our story the context is everything. The strike itself represents a
confused response to a series of transformations extending far be-
yond the employment of musicians. At the heart of the problem is
what critic/philosopher Walter Benjamin identified as the way a
work of art—and here he is primarily speaking of the impact of
photography on the visual arts—changes in the ‘‘age of mechanical
reproduction.’’ Benjamin’s interrogation is central to the entire his-
tory of music under capitalism, for efforts to ‘‘rationalize’’ and per-
fect music making in a market-driven world have led to inventions
intended to eliminate human error or to capture flawless perfor-
mances for posterity as well as for mass production and distri-
bution.
In the 1850s, steam calliopes were introduced to replace brass
bands on Mississippi river boats. Around the turn of the century the
player piano came into being, and then the jukebox, followed by the
radio. With the onset of the Great Depression, musicians and even
some composers were genuinely alarmed about their future, as ra-
dio stations increasingly replaced live orchestras with recorded

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 Robin D.G. Kelley
music and jukeboxes appeared more frequently in restaurants and
clubs. And if that wasn’t bad enough, in 1934 a subsidiary of the
North American Company, the Muzak Corporation, introduced a
system to wire music directly into hotels and restaurants, and later
into retail stores. Muzak made it possible for one band to play simul-
taneously for many venues.
The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers
(ASCAP) officially sounded the alarm in a small book titled Nothing
Can Replace Music. Published in 1933, it contained essays at-
tacking the use of recording technology and radio, including one ti-
tled ‘‘Mechanization Presents Serious Danger to Musical Art.’’ Yet
not everyone in the music world agreed. In fact, it’s a bit ironic that
the musicians’ struggle to survive a brave new world of recording
technology occurred during an era of heightened musical pop-
ulism.
As evidenced by the resurgence of American folk music, this
was an age when radical composers like Marc Blitzstein, Charles
Ives, Aaron Copland, Earl Robinson, and Bernard Herrmann ruled
the American scene with an expressed commitment to reach a
broader audience. Many of them viewed the radio as one of their
primary venues for reaching the masses. Works such as Marc
Blitzstein’s ‘‘I’ve Got the Tune’’ and Earl Robinson’s ‘‘Ballad for
Americans’’ were prepared specifically for radio broadcast. Seeing
the technologies of mass production as a benefit rather than a hin-
drance, some composers also found the same radical potential in
cinema. Indeed, Aaron Copland relished the fact that the Depres-
sion generated a need for ‘‘functional music,’’ which for him had ex-
citing possibilities that could be realized in cinema:

In all the arts the Depression had aroused a wave of sympathy for and
identification with the plight of the common man. In music this was
combined with the heady wine of suddenly feeling ourselves—the
composers, that is—needed as never before. Previously our works had
been largely self-engendered: no one asked for them: we simply wrote
them out of our own need. Now, suddenly, functional music was in de-

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mand as never before. Motion-picture and ballet companies, radio sta-
tions and schools, film and theater producers discovered us. The music
appropriate for the different kinds of cooperative ventures under-
taken by these people had to be simpler and more direct. (Quoted in
Flinn, Strains of Utopia)

The celebration of American folk music as an embodiment of

older pastoral values clashed with the problem of making music in
the age of mechanical reproduction—the very source of the musi-
cians’ struggle. Interestingly enough, this contradiction was almost
never remarked upon by union leaders. Even in the pages of the In-
ternational Musician (organ of the AFM), alongside a stirring ac-
count of Local 802’s protest against the demise of theater work, con-
ductor Leopold Stokowski of the world-renowned Philadelphia
Orchestra defended film as a means to spread art music to the
masses. ‘‘It seems to us high time,’’ he wrote, ‘‘that we begin to help
realize the great possibilities of the present-day sound film for mul-
tiplying the audience for the world’s richest and most satisfying
music.’’ (He did more than write for film; he made occasional
appearances, most notably in Disney’s 1940 production Fantasia.)
Responding to the fear that in swing-crazed America jazz might re-
place serious concert music, he believed that mechanical reproduc-
tion—especially film—was a way to bring serious music back to the
public without having to compete with ‘‘low’’ art. ‘‘Bach,’’ he wrote,
‘‘has certainly nothing to fear from the hottest jazz arrange-
ment. . . . The color and glitter of instrumentation which dance
bands have come to use lately can be traced to the rich storehouse
of effects in the best classical music.’’
Stokowski’s observation raises yet another submerged issue in
the struggle against mechanical reproduction: the fear of too much
populism, especially populism of the Negro variety. As one St.
Louis musician complained, radio and ‘‘mechanical playing’’ had
changed tastes and thus made it difficult for ‘‘serious’’ musicians to
find work. ‘‘Many of the finer artists,’’ he added, ‘‘have refused even
to be starved into playing jazz.’’ He then wondered if ‘‘public taste

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 Robin D.G. Kelley
ever will get back to its former standards.’’ In other words, he partly
blamed the unemployment situation on the dominance of jazz and
the lowbrow tastes of audiences.
This complaint might be exaggerated, but it does hit upon a sore
spot in the political economy of Depression-era art. As musician/
scholar George Lewis once said, T. W. Adorno and the Frankfurt
School hated jazz because they feared their competitors: jazz was
threatening to become the art music of the twentieth century. And
I would add that these fears were not simply a matter of collapsing
class hierarchies alone. Musicians labor in different genres, each
one carrying specific class, race, and gender implications, which re-
produce a cultural hierarchy that determines conditions of work
and pay. In music these differentials are not based on skill level but
on a racialized, gendered, and class-based ‘‘high/low’’ cultural di-
vide. A glance at Local 802’s 1936 wage scale makes the point.
Whereas musicians in dance bands received a minimum of $42 for
a seven-day work week consisting of five-hour evenings and three
matinees (a total of forty-four hours), concert performers earned
$60 for six evenings of four-hour performances, or twenty-four
hours of work per week. And they were entitled to an additional $10
for Sunday evening concerts. Not surprisingly, film studio musi-
cians fetched the highest rates, earning $200 for a five-and-a-half-
day work week not to exceed thirty-three hours.
While many musicians were capable of crossing these genre
boundaries—and did so regularly—the work cultures remained
fairly discrete. Artists in ‘‘high’’ genres tended to denigrate popular
music and the artists who created it—particularly black music. The
policing of these boundaries grows out of a long tradition of margin-
alizing what is in fact central to American culture: blackness. It is
not an accident that the first successful talkie was a performance of
blackness, Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer. Nor can we forget that the
first ‘‘hit song’’ of the sheet music age was T. D. Rice’s ‘‘Jim Crow
Song,’’ or that the first literary best-seller was Harriet Beecher
Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. More to the point, immediately after

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 Without a Song
the success of Jolson’s blackface performance, the studios rushed
out to sign up black acts for sound film.
Convinced that song and dance could most effectively show off
the new technology, the big studios produced several films featur-
ing African American musical entertainers. In 1929, Paramount
released several such films, including Music Hath Charms, The
Framing of the Shrew, and Melancholy Dame, a short ‘‘plantation’’
musical based on a story by white Southerner Octavus Roy Cohen.
That same year RKO released Black and Tan, featuring Duke El-
lington, St. Louis Blues, starring the great blues singer Bessie
Smith, and the classic all-black musical Hallelujah! Black musical
performance also functioned as a replacement for certain kinds of
vaudeville acts performed in theaters before the advent of talkies.
On with the Show, which also appeared in 1929, opens with eager
fans anxious to hear Ethel Waters sing ‘‘Am I Blue.’’ And the ad for
Hearts of Dixie read like a vaudeville/minstrel playbill, promising
‘‘Negro spirituals . . . sung by a magnificent chorus—stevedores
and roust-abouts croon thrilling melodies as the ‘Nellie Bly’ pulls
into [the] wharf—cake walks, folk dances, native jazz orchestras,
the birth of the blues . . . [all] in a breathlessly beautiful and realistic
panorama of life along the levees and in the cotton fields with a cast
of 200 Native Entertainers.’’
The wave of black musical films turned out to be short-lived, but
the prominence of jazz in popular culture continued. Complexions
changed, however, as the kings of the ‘‘swing era’’ turned out to be
white bandleaders like Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Glenn
Miller, and Paul Whiteman, and their work found some acceptance
in the hallowed concert halls of high culture. Although purists
balked at the practice, the leading swing bands ‘‘jazzed’’ the clas-
sics, transforming songs such as Debussy’s ‘‘Reverie’’ and Ravel’s
‘‘Pavane’’ into swing numbers. Thus the shift in film music produc-
tion from local musicians to all-white studio orchestras coincided
with the ‘‘Whitemanning’’ of the jazz age.
By the late 1930s, swing had become the music of Middle Amer-

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 Robin D.G. Kelley
ica. AFM president Joseph Weber even devoted a lengthy column
in the International Musician to the evolution of swing as an im-
portant musical development. What did not happen, however, was
the incorporation of swing into film music per se, that is, into the
scores or the soundtracks that accompanied the action on the
screen. Although swing bands were employed fairly frequently in
1930s cinema in front of the camera in cameo shots or as back-
ground for dance scenes, as historian Caryl Flinn points out, film
scores in the 1930s—the era of mass production—were more likely
to embody the utopian strains of nineteenth-century romanticism
than the modernism that marked the first half of the twentieth
century.
So that poor St. Louis musician need not have worried too much,
for black music without black bodies had become ‘‘serious’’ music,
though still quite inferior to real concert music. All he’d have to do
now was learn the changes.

‘‘strike up the band’’

By the summer of 1936, the AFM’s public relations campaign had
failed miserably to sway popular opinion. Audiences embraced
sound film and often found the quality of music to be higher than
what live orchestras had produced a decade earlier—that is, if they
could remember the day of the old silents at all. Realizing that noth-
ing would change without militant action, Local 802 leaders de-
cided that a more confrontational strategy was needed to persuade
the theaters to bring back live music and vaudeville acts. After
spending much of August planning and debating, the union held a
mass meeting on September 10 to inaugurate a campaign to bring
‘‘flesh’’ back to the motion picture theaters. Close to five thousand
musicians, actors and ‘‘friends of stage shows’’ showed up at the
Manhattan Opera House to hear speeches by union leaders and
supporters, including the ‘‘father of the blues,’’ W. C. Handy, and
Rose Schneiderman, the popular secretary of the Women’s Trade
Union League.

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 Without a Song
Schneiderman opened with the comment that she had never ad-
dressed ‘‘a meeting of artists,’’ but she was nonetheless in sympathy
with the plight of theater musicians and promised the support of
the city’s working women in order to ensure their success. Her re-
mark was telling, for it unwittingly revealed the ambivalence of or-
ganized labor to the ‘‘laboring artist’’ and thus exposed one of the
limits to solidarity. But Local 802 secretary Fred Birnbach appar-
ently thought that organized labor could deliver the collective
strength that the musicians would need to succeed. He called for
the cooperation of the entire labor movement in making the de-
mand for living entertainment and proposed a boycott of neighbor-
hood theaters if they completely shifted to recorded sound. The
rally ended with the passing of a resolution pledging not to patron-
ize theaters that did not employ musicians. Underlying the resolu-
tion, however, was a presumption carried over from the local union’s
failed publicity campaign, one that accepted as a given that live mu-
sic was a natural ‘‘workers’’ demand. The resolution asserted that
musicians had been ‘‘thrown out of theaters in complete disregard
for the public’s love for live entertainment,’’ as well as disregard for
the economic consequences for musicians and actors themselves.
Over the next few weeks, the union picketed theaters through-
out the city, organized a parade through Harlem to bring attention
to the campaign, printed up fifty thousand buttons, and distributed
ten thousand placards to retail owners to be displayed in store win-
dows calling for the return of ‘‘living music.’’ Local 802’s executive
committee proposed more mass meetings and special public con-
certs, and they launched a newsletter called the Theater Pit for the
sole purpose of promoting the strike/boycott. Initially there was
some confusion over what the union wanted: were they opposed to
sound films in principle or did they want to compel theater owners
to hire live musicians to play between screenings? In a short article
published a week after the rally, the New York Times described the
union as wanting to ‘‘compel picture and other theatres to abandon
‘canned’ music and reinstate orchestras, bands and vaudeville.’’

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 Robin D.G. Kelley
This prompted a letter from Jacob Rosenberg (secretary of Local
802) and Ralph Whitehead (secretary of American Federation of
Actors) explaining that the theater drive was not ‘‘a fight against
‘canned music’ ’’ but rather a ‘‘fight for re-employment by men dis-
placed not by the machine but by the elimination of orchestras and
actors in order to swell profits.’’
The confusion about the musician’s strike was probably shared
by moviegoers who were confronted by picketers chanting, ‘‘Bring
back flesh.’’ But it is also likely that organized labor was not entirely
clear about what the musicians were fighting for. Less than a month
into the strike, Local 802 leaders noted a ‘‘lack of sympathy, under-
standing and cooperation on the part of large portions of the gen-
eral public and trade unions.’’ The theater drive committee decided
to regroup by focusing their attacks on ‘‘block booking’’—the big
studios’ ability to force independent theaters into showing their
feature films—as a means to win support from the Independent
Theatre Owners Association. According to this strategy, a success-
ful fight against block booking would ‘‘necessitate the elimination
of certain pictures and [promote] the use of vaudeville.’’ The union
believed that by refusing to enter into block-booking arrangements
and encouraging independent theater owners to hire vaudeville
acts, they could break the monopoly hold of the big studios and the-
ater chains and create jobs for musicians. Those theaters choosing
not to go along with the program would then be the target of Local
802 pickets.
The union’s theater drive committee came up with other ideas
as well. They produced a small pamphlet outlining the musicians’
struggle against canned music, planned to persuade radio stations
to subsidize live shows as a source of securing new talent, and pro-
posed picketing only one chain of theaters as a way of concentrating
their forces. They also formed neighborhood committees to ap-
proach theater managers directly and request live music. The last
strategy produced some short-lived results. A few managers in Ja-
maica, Queens, and the Bronx, agreed to hire vaudeville units to

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 Without a Song
provide forty minutes of entertainment for a reasonable price,
though this experiment lasted but a few weeks. Loew’s Grand The-
atre also agreed to stage a vaudeville presentation between reels,
but according to the theater management this turned out to be an
economic disaster. Local 802 officials protested, insisting that this
‘‘failure’’ was the prearranged result of hiring third-rate talent and
manipulating the books to show a loss.
Streamlining and consolidating the theater drive did not solve
the problem of mass support. Movie attendance apparently did not
waver, and musicians, for the most part, were not fulfilling their
obligation to picket. As an incentive, the local began providing car-
fare and lunch money for unemployed musicians who volunteered
for picket duty. These incentives did little to expand the picket
lines, which may be partly explained by the increased police pres-
ence outside of theaters caused by the operators’ bombings.
In addition, the fear of negative public reaction and the mayor’s
initial reluctance to grant a parade permit led union leaders to post-
pone plans for a mass march through downtown on November 14.
They were able to secure a permit for an automobile parade for the
following Saturday, November 21, that would begin on Broadway
and 51st street and end at City Hall. Altogether, they organized
seventy-eight vehicles, including trucks donated by the Teamsters
Union to carry fifteen- to twenty-piece bands. The main purpose of
the motor parade was to draw the public’s attention to Local 802’s
campaign and mobilize more support for live music. In the end,
however, it garnered very little attention in the press and failed to
win substantial numbers of people to their cause. The onlookers
were mostly curious weekend shoppers, some of whom might have
been headed for a Saturday matinee.
By the end of December it was clear that the theater campaign
was in trouble. Not only did the union have difficulty maintain-
ing picket lines, but a few musicians, particularly in Harlem, were
brought before Local 802’s trial board for crossing picket lines. And
during the last five months of 1936 the local failed to achieve a quo-

[ 147 ]
 Robin D.G. Kelley
rum at any of its monthly general membership meetings. Given the
shortage of willing activists, the theater committee decided to con-
centrate their picketing on neighborhood movie houses rather than
large Broadway theaters since the latter were ‘‘maintained more for
publicity to the picture business than profit and the neighborhood
theaters would really feel the pressure more.’’
Picketing continued through the winter months of 1936–37 but
remained largely invisible. It did pick up again in March, after Lo-
cal 802’s executive board decided once again to reassess its strategy.
After considering and jettisoning a plan for compulsory picketing,
the theater drive committee, made up of David Freed, William
Feinberg, Harry Suber, and Robert Sterne, voted to continue to
vigorously recruit volunteer pickets and to try to solicit more sup-
port from organized labor. Besides the inaugural mass meetings,
New York labor leaders had been surprisingly silent with regard to
the musicians’ strike. Although we can only speculate, it is reason-
able to assume that the majority of rank-and-file trade unionists in
the city, not to mention labor bureaucrats, crossed the AFM picket
line on a regular basis in order to catch the latest films. On the other
hand, Local 802 was not always visible at labor solidarity events,
with the exception of its militant left wing, which regularly partici-
pated in the city’s united May Day parade.
In order to try and restore ‘‘enthusiasm’’ for the strike, the exec-
utive committee decided to recruit pickets on a strictly voluntary
basis. Initially, fifteen hundred members signed up for duty at the
beginning of March, and many pledged to accept three or four as-
signments. But once they hit the theaters the numbers fell sharply.
Secretary William Feinberg reported that while the rank-and-file
volunteers were sincere, ‘‘their personal prejudice against picketing
won out over their sincerity when the actual time for their picket as-
signments arrived. . . . Their absence broke up and demoralized
picket lines to such an extent that those who did report would some-
times find themselves all alone, and they too would become dis-
couraged and drop out of the Theatre Drive.’’ Members of the the-

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 Without a Song
ater drive committee also attributed part of the problem to the
policy of giving fifty-cent vouchers for each stint on the picket line.
The vouchers not only cost the local about fourteen hundred dollars
a week, but Feinberg reported that the payments caused attrition
because many employed picketers ‘‘could not escape the feeling
that in taking picket assignments they were not helping the drive so
much as they were depriving some unemployed pickets of an addi-
tional 50 cent voucher.’’
The union’s inability to sustain picket lines was only part of the
problem. Once again, Local 802 leaders had to rethink their entire
strategy. Up until the spring of 1937, the union focused its energies
on key theaters known for vaudeville and stage presentations be-
fore the transition to sound film. Consequently, they ended up pick-
eting/striking six different theater companies at the same time,
thus spreading what strength they had too thin. Now they decided
to focus on one company, RKO. They chose RKO because it did not
have a single vaudeville theater in New York City and because, in
the union’s view, it actively destroyed live music by taking over lead-
ing vaudeville houses and using them exclusively for motion pic-
tures. At the time, RKO operated twenty-eight houses in the city;
Local 802 began picketing nineteen of them.
The executive committee also agreed to drop the campaign’s de-
mand to bring back vaudeville and instead ask theaters to simply
hire orchestras. Noting that ‘‘some people like vaudeville—others
dislike it,’’ union officials realized that those who disliked it tended
to oppose the campaign. The return of theater orchestras to be used
in whatever manner management saw fit, they reasoned, should
generate a broader base of support. And they were not demanding
a band in every theater. On the contrary, in their struggle with RKO
the union asked the chain to place orchestras in eight of their
twenty-eight theaters, or two orchestras each for Manhattan,
Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. If RKO refused to negotiate, the
union pledged ‘‘to throw the full force of the strength of the local
against them.’’

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 Robin D.G. Kelley
Infused with new ideas, renewed enthusiasm, and a more man-
ageable agenda, Local 802 launched their RKO campaign at the be-
ginning of April of 1937. Immediately, however, their efforts were
stalled by the discovery that RKO employed five organists (Arlo
Hultz, Ralph Tishbang, Leo Weber, Bob West, and B. Cowhan) in
theaters Local 802 picketed. The union could not continue their ac-
tions as long as the organists worked there. Meanwhile, RKO man-
agement threatened to fire the organists if the picketing continued.
With the approval of national AFM leadership, Local 802 elected to
withdraw the musicians and continue picketing, but Hultz, Tish-
bang, Weber, West, and Cowhan had no intention of giving up their
jobs for a campaign that had not yielded any victories in seven
months. Worried about their source of livelihood, the organists pe-
titioned the union to allow them to extend their engagement until
the upcoming AFM convention in June. When their proposal was
rejected, they then asked for strike benefits, to which the executive
committee agreed.
The RKO campaign generated more rank-and-file support than
any of the previous initiatives since the theater drive was first
launched in September of 1936. On June 1, Local 802’s executive
board met with president Weber to discuss the possibility of turn-
ing their citywide struggle into a national campaign, promising to
draft a resolution on the matter for the upcoming national conven-
tion. Their battle with RKO even showed signs of greater confi-
dence and audacity on the part of Local 802. On June 12, picketers
orchestrated a successful sit-in demonstration at the Palace Theater
and they felt they had just begun to force RKO management to the
negotiating table.
We will never know what might have happened next because a
week later, during the AFM national convention in Louisville, Lo-
cal 802 failed to get national support for their theater drive. In fact,
the New York delegates were at the center of a stormy debate over
what to do about ‘‘canned music.’’ Introducing fifteen specific pro-
posals from the floor to restrict the mechanization of music, Local

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 Without a Song
802 delegates argued that ‘‘the abuse and misuse of mechanical re-
production of music constitute a threat which may annihilate the
profession.’’ Weber, on the other hand, vehemently opposed Lo-
cal 802’s proposal, particularly their suggestions for direct action
against the studios and a ban on recording. The convention over-
whelmingly shot down the local’s proposals, including their plan for
a national theater drive. The New York delegates left the conven-
tion feeling so betrayed by the AFM’s national leadership that one
Local 802 member, J. F. McMahon, wrote to AFL president Wil-
liam Green criticizing Weber’s policies and accusing him of refus-
ing ‘‘to assist us in our drive for Live Music.’’ ‘‘We must face facts,’’
McMahon continued. ‘‘Invention, mass production, and unfettered
monster trusts have us by the throat, [but] Weber does nothing.’’
Without national support, Local 802 leaders believed the move-
ment was doomed. They also concluded that, given what the local
had already paid out in strike funds, vouchers, and relief, to con-
tinue the drive would amount to financial suicide. So on July 8,
1937, the executive committee of Local 802 voted to end their
‘‘strike’’ against the movie theaters. An inauspicious ending to what
had turned out to be a fairly inauspicious campaign.

postlude: ‘‘all about the benjamins,’’ or, the work

of art in the age of mechanical reproduction
While the theater campaign turned out to be a dismal failure, it did
expose the need for a more thoughtful policy regarding mechanical
reproduction and musicians’ labor. And despite Weber’s initial con-
servative opposition to the New York delegation, not long after the
1937 convention he seemed to adopt a more militant stance with re-
gard to recorded music.
First, the AFM bureaucracy directed its attention to radio, pro-
posing that the networks increase the size of the staff orchestras
employed by their affiliated stations and limit the use of recorded
music in their broadcasts. If they did not do this, the union threat-
ened to strike. Weber later hinted that the strike might extend be-

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 Robin D.G. Kelley
yond the radio networks to the record industry as well. Among his
most controversial proposals was a licensing agreement that would
restrict the use of recorded music to businesses that employed mu-
sicians, so if an independent radio station had no musicians on its
payroll, it therefore could not obtain a license to play recorded mu-
sic. Not surprisingly, radio industry executives rejected the plan,
calling it a secondary boycott and thus a violation of the Sherman
Antitrust Act. But they wanted to avoid a strike and were willing to
negotiate. In the end the affiliates collectively agreed to spend an
additional $1.5 million for live music, and over two hundred affili-
ates agreed to either hire orchestras or augment the orchestras they
already had in their employ. Even the large networks, NBC, CBS,
and Mutual, pledged to increase their annual budget for musicians
by half a million dollars.
The mere threat of a strike, to which radio executives had to re-
spond, marked a departure from the AFM’s earlier strategies under
Weber. He now seemed less accommodating and less willing to
accept the idea that the march of technology was inevitable. The
AFM’s position now was that laboring artists ought to have a legiti-
mate voice in production decisions and control over their work, as
well as a share in the allocation of profits. And capital had a respon-
sibility to labor to provide employment opportunities. Yet when
Weber finally met with studio executives in the film industry in
1938, all of his militancy seemed to evaporate. Perhaps he was sen-
sitive to the fact that the economy had turned downward, the stu-
dios were reporting substantial losses, and the U.S. Justice Depart-
ment had just hit the film industry with an antitrust lawsuit.
Whatever the case, Weber met with the Studio Producers’ Com-
mittee in New York and made a proposal that seemed astonishing
both for its conciliatory tone and its impracticality. Hoping to avoid
a strike, he offered to lower the wage scale of Hollywood studio mu-
sicians in exchange for bringing musicians back to the theaters.
The committee rejected this, Weber’s first proposal, outright, ar-
guing that they had gotten rid of musicians in theaters because em-

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 Without a Song
ploying them in those venues was no longer practical—after all, the
public came to the theater for films, not concerts. And even if such
a thing could be done, it would mean higher admission fees for pa-
trons and there was no evidence that the public would be willing to
pay more for the combination of sound movies and live musical per-
formances. But there was yet another, unacknowledged problem
with Weber’s proposal. Because the federal antitrust suit proposed
that the courts divest the movie studios of the theaters they owned,
had the committee accepted Weber’s demands it all would have
been moot if the studios no longer owned theaters in which musi-
cians might play.
Weber’s next plan proved far more radical, but the AFM was in
no position to make it happen. He proposed a ‘‘tax’’ on all studio
films, the proceeds of which would be used to hire unemployed mu-
sicians to give free concerts; there would be a nominal fee on each
reel, and it would vary according to the size of the theater. Weber
believed this scheme could raise between $18 million and $25 mil-
lion a year. The producers’ committee found the proposal laugh-
able, calling it a form of private welfare. The executives insisted that
the plight of jobless musicians was not their responsibility; if they
needed relief they ought to turn to the government.
At that point the AFM’s negotiations with the Studio Producers’
Committee came to an abrupt end. The union never exercised the
option of calling a strike of the studios because it would have been
doomed to failure. There were less than five hundred Hollywood
studio musicians, and to ask them to walk out on behalf of some
twenty thousand other musicians nationwide was unrealistic, espe-
cially in the midst of an economic crisis.
Weber was never able to persuade the film industry to take re-
sponsibility for the massive displacement of musicians by tech-
nology, but his successor, James Petrillo, adopted an even more ag-
gressive stance toward the music industry’s broader corporate
structure. Between 1942 and 1944, when virtually every segment of
organized labor committed to a no-strike pledge in support of the

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 Robin D.G. Kelley
war effort, the AFM under Petrillo struck the record industry by
banning all union members from making records until the record
producers agreed to set aside a percentage of royalties to be used to
assist unemployed musicians.
The AFM under Petrillo emerged from the war as a power to be
reckoned with; Local 802’s membership alone increased from
nearly sixteen thousand in 1936 to thirty-one thousand in 1948.
Petrillo also became a major target of the government’s postwar
anti-labor backlash. Besides subjecting the union to a number of in-
vestigations and hearings, in 1945 Congress passed the Lea Act—
better known as the ‘‘anti-Petrillo bill’’—which banned the union
from using ‘‘intimidation,’’ including strikes or boycotts, to compel
employers in radio to hire more musicians than were needed. In
other words, the union could no longer demand the hiring of
‘‘standby’’ orchestras or determine orchestra size. Furthermore, not
only did the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, banning closed
shops, sympathy strikes, and secondary boycotts, weaken the bar-
gaining power of all organized labor, but a provision in the act out-
lawed the AFM’s record royalty fund. Any sort of industry paybacks
to unions that did not involve actual services were now deemed ille-
gal under Taft-Hartley. However, when the AFM’s recording con-
tracts expired on January 1, 1948, Petrillo called another recording
ban. This time the industry was in a strong position, having made
and stockpiled many more records than it could release onto the
market at once. The ban lasted almost a full year, culminating in a
small victory for the AFM. To replace the record royalty fund, the
industry agreed to establish a Music Performance Trust Fund that
would finance free concerts and pay struggling musicians union
scale.
Neither the fund nor the power held by the AFM lasted very
long. As technology continued to advance—especially with the
proliferation of jukeboxes, the advent of television, and, more re-
cently, the internet (MP3 and Napster)—musicians continued to
struggle for gainful employment and the rightful share of the profits

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 Without a Song
generated from their work. And the union’s initial argument that re-
cordings are inherently inferior to live music lost some of its bite as
developments in studio technology vastly improved sound quality.
The ability of sound engineers to alter pitch, edit, and eliminate
mistakes have allowed musicians to improve on the ‘‘real thing.’’
During the 1970s and 1980s, with the increased use of sophisti-
cated synthesizers and samplers able to electronically reproduce
entire orchestras, musicians faced yet another crisis of displace-
ment. Suddenly a keyboard and a programmer could do the work of
a seventy-piece band and do it flawlessly. Although musicians were
never fully replaced, television and film studios increasingly turned
to synthesized music to produce soundtracks.
For musicians, then, perhaps the problem of the twentieth cen-
tury is the problem of the power line. At the same time, the new
technologies have been a source of new creative as well as financial
possibilities. Mechanical reproduction has generated opportuni-
ties for musicians by making all kinds of music more available to
the public and giving many struggling artists access to worldwide
distribution. Technological advances have also encouraged exper-
imentation and the creation of new musical genres that utilize
recording and playback devices—mixers, digital samplers, turn-
tables, drum machines, computers—as instruments.
The problem, in other words, has never been simply a matter of
technology. Rather, the real question is, What should be the rela-
tionship between the laboring artist and the market? How much
should musicians receive for their labor? What percentage of the
current global, multi-trillion-dollar entertainment industry is
rightfully theirs? When will we see musicians as workers and real-
ize that wealth in the music industry is generated in the same way it
was generated in the coal mines of Ludlow: through the exploita-
tion of creative labor?

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 Bibliography

the colorado coal strike, 1913–14

Samuel Yellen’s American Labor Struggles (Harcourt Brace, 1936)
first led me to the Colorado coal strike, which occupies one
chapter in that collection of essays on ten important labor con-
flicts, from the railroad uprisings of 1877 to the longshoremen’s
strike of 1934 in San Francisco.
Priscilla Long’s Where the Sun Never Shines: A History of Ameri-
ca’s Bloody Coal Industry (University of Colorado, 1989) is a
beautifully written account that includes the story of the strike
and much more, and is indispensable background for the events
I describe in this essay.
There is valuable firsthand testimony in the two government re-
ports on the strike. One is the three-volume report of the U.S.
Commission on Industrial Relations, Report and Testimony
(Government Printing Office, 1916). The other is the two-
volume report by the House Mines and Mining Committtee,
Conditions in the Coal Mines of Colorado (Government Print-
ing Office, 1914).
The official summary of the report of the Commission on Industrial
Relations is by George West, Report on the Colorado Strike
(Government Printing Office, 1915).
For descriptions of life in the mining camps, see George Korson,
Coal Dust on the Fiddle (Folklore, 1965), as well as McAlister
Coleman, Men and Coal (Farrar & Rinehart, 1943).

[ 157 ]
 Bibliography
Out of Our Depths, by Barron Beshoar, son of the miners’ physi-
cian, is a biography of John Lawson but also an account of the
strike.
Report to the Governor, by Edward Boughton (Denver, 1914), is
the report of the military commission set up by Governor Am-
mons to report to him on the fateful events of April 20, 1914, at
Ludlow.
Militarism in Colorado, by William Brewster (Denver, 1914), is
the six-hundred-page compilation of reports on National Guard
brutality.
The Great Coalfield War, by George McGovern (former senator
from South Dakota and presidential candidate) and Leonard
Guttridge (Houghton Mifflin, 1972), is the first book-length ac-
count of the Colorado strike.
Buried Unsung: Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre, by Zeese
Papanikolas (University of Utah Press, 1982), is an extraordi-
narily vivid piece of research based on many firsthand inter-
views with participants in the strike.
The only participant’s book on the strike is by Mary Thomas O’Neal
(described in my essay as Mary Thomas), Those Damn Foreign-
ers (Hollywood, 1971).
The mine owners’ point of view is presented in Facts Concerning
the Struggle in Colorado for Industrial Freedom, by the Com-
mittee of Coal Mine Managers (Denver, 1914).
There is an excellent biography of Mother Jones by Dale Fether-
ling, Mother Jones, The Miners’ Angel: A Portrait (Southern Illi-
nois University Press, 1974).
Philip Foner has edited a fine collection of Mother Jones’s speeches
and writings, Mother Jones Speaks (Monad Press, 1983).
The newspapers and periodicals I consulted for contemporary arti-
cles and commentaries are: the Rocky Mountain News, the
United Mine Workers Journal, the New York Times, and the In-
ternational Socialist Review.

[ 158 ]
 Bibliography
girl strikers occupy chain store, win big
For the history of Woolworth’s, start with James Brough, The Wool-
worths (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982). See also Robert C.
Kirkwood, The Woolworth Story at Home and Abroad (New
York: Newcomen Society, 1960); John P. Nichols, Skyline Queen
and the Merchant Prince (New York, Trident Press, 1973); John
K. Winkler, Five and Ten: The Fabulous Life of F. W. Woolworth
(New York: Robert McBride, 1940); F. W. Woolworth at Ninety:
Diversified for Dominance (Orange, Conn.: Lebhar-Friedman,
1968); Alan R. Raucher, ‘‘Dime Store Chains: The Making of
Organization Men, 1880–1940,’’ Business History Review 65
(spring 1991): 130–63; Adele Hast, ed., International Direc-
tory of Company Histories (Detroit: St. James Press, 1992,
1998), vol. 5, 224–27; vol. 20, 528–32; Annual Reports, F. W.
Woolworth Company, 1912–1950; regular articles in Chain
Store Age during the 1920s and 1930s.
On Barbara Hutton, the best source is C. David Heymann, Poor
Little Rich Girl: The Life and Legend of Barbara Hutton (Sea-
caucus, N.J.: L. Stuart, 1984); see also Brough, The Woolworths.
Other sources include Dean Jennings, Barbara Hutton: A Can-
did Biography (New York: Frederick Fell, 1968); and Philip Van
Renssalaer, Million Dollar Baby: An Intimate Portrait of Bar-
bara Hutton (New York: Putnam, 1979). For a wonderful analy-
sis of cosmetics, beautification, and women’s appropriation of
both, consult Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of Ameri-
ca’s Beauty Culture (New York: Henry Holt, 1998). For tips,
How to Get Your Man and Hold Him, illustrated by Dorothy
Hoover Downs (A. L. Taylor, 1936), is still widely available in
stores that sell used and rare books.
On the growth of chain stores—including additional material on
Woolworth’s—the literature is vast. A sampling includes God-
frey M. Lebhar, Chain Stores in America, 1859–1962, third ed.
(New York: Chain Store Publishing Co., 1963); Charles G.

[ 159 ]
 Bibliography
Daughters, Wells of Discontent: A Study of the Economic, So-
cial, and Political Aspects of the Chain Store (New York: New-
son & Co., 1937); William J. Baxter, Chain Store Distribution
and Management (New York: Harper & Bros., 1928); John Peter
Nichols, The Chain Store Tells Its Story (New York: Institute of
Distribution, 1940); Raucher, ‘‘Dime Store Chains’’; Thomas
Mahoney and Leonard Sloane, The Great Merchants: Ameri-
ca’s Foremost Retail Institutions and the People Who Made
Them Great (New York: Harper & Row, 1966); Joseph Gustaitis,
‘‘The Nickel and Dime Empire,’’ American History 33, no. 1
(1998): 40–46.
For the anti-chain movement, see Carl G. Ryant, ‘‘The Unbroken
Chain: Opposition to Chain Stores During the Great Depres-
sion’’ (M.A. thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1985);
Thomas W. Ross, Store Wars: The Chain Tax Movement, Work-
ing Paper No. 34, University of Chicago Center for the Study of
the Economy and the State (July 1984); Thomas Ross, ‘‘Store
Wars: The Chain Tax Movement,’’ Journal of Law and Econom-
ics 24 (April 1986): 125–37; F. J. Harper, ‘‘ ‘A New Battle on Evo-
lution’: The Anti-chain Store Trade-at-Home Agitation of 1929–
1930,’’ American Studies 16, no. 3 (1982): 407–26; F. J. Harper,
‘‘The Anti-chain Store Movement in the United States, 1927–
1940’’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Warwick, Centre for
the Study of Social History, 1981). For the chains’ reply, see
E. C. Buehler, Debate Handbook on the Chain Store Question
(Warren, Kansas: University of Kansas).
For working conditions and management strategies at Woolworth’s
in the 1930s, Therese Mitchell’s Consider the Woolworth Work-
ers (New York: League of Women Shoppers, 1940) provides a
gold mine of interviews and information, with information on
New York organizing as well. Mary Elizabeth Pidgeon’s Women
in 5-and-10-Cent Stores and Limited Price Chain Department
Stores (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1930;

[ 160 ]
 Bibliography
U.S. Department of Labor Women’s Bureau Bulletin No. 76) of-
fers a national survey of Woolworth’s workers; see also Janet
Hooks, Women’s Occupations through Seven Decades (Wash-
ington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1947; U.S. Depart-
ment of Labor Women’s Bureau Bulletin No. 218). For tidbits on
Woolworth’s management strategies see also Baxter, Chain
Store Distribution and Management, and Walter S. Hayward
and Percival White, Chain Stores: Their Management and Op-
eration, third ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1928).
For the big picture of the CIO in the 1930s, consult Robert Zieger,
The CIO 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North
Carolina Press, 1995); Foster Rhea Dulles and Melvyn Du-
bofsky, Labor in America: A History, fourth ed. (Arlington
Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1984). For the General Motors
strike, the definitive study is Sidney Fine’s Sit-Down: The Gen-
eral Motors Strike of 1936–1937 (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1969). For the UAW and the strike, see Nelson
Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reu-
ther and the Fate of American Labor (New York: Basic Books,
1995); Henry Kraus, Heroes of Unwritten Story: The UAW
1934–39 (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Ed-
ward Levinson, Labor on the March (New York: Harper &
Bros., 1938).
On the Detroit labor movement in 1937, I am indebted to Steve
Babson, Working Detroit: The Making of a Union Town, with
Ron Alpern, Dave Elsila, and John Revitte (New York: Adama
Books, 1984); Alpern, Babson, Elsila, and Revitte, Union Town:
A Labor History Guide to Detroit (Detroit: Workers’ Education
Local 189); Carlos A. Schwantes, ‘‘ ‘We’ve Got ’Em on the Run,
Brothers: The 1937 Non-Automotive Sit Down Strikes in De-
troit,’’ Michigan History, fall 1992, 179–99.
For an understanding of the AFL and women workers, see Alice
Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning

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 Bibliography
Women in the United States (New York: Oxford, 1982); Dorothy
Sue Cobble, Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the
Twentieth Century (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press,
1991); Elizabeth Faue, Community of Suffering and Struggle:
Women, Men, and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915–
1945 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press,
1991); Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire:
Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900–
1965 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press,
1995). For the CIO, see Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The
Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex During World War II (Ur-
bana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1987); Nancy Gabin, Fem-
inism in the Labor Movement: Women and the United Auto
Workers, 1935–1975 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1990); Vicki Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican
Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing In-
dustry, 1930–1950 (Albuquerque, N. M.: University of New
Mexico Press, 1987); Sharon Hartman Strom, ‘‘Challenging
‘Woman’s Place’: Feminism, the Left, and Industrial Unionism
in the 1930s,’’ Feminist Studies 9 (1983): 359–86. For an analysis
of the concept of ‘‘girl strikers’’ and their relationship to con-
sumer culture in an earlier period, see Nan Enstad, ‘‘Fashioning
Political Identities: Cultural Studies and the Historical Con-
struction of Political Subjects,’’ American Quarterly 50, no. 4
(1988).
For the Woolworth’s strike itself (including many of the headlines
employed in my text), I used, first of all, newspaper and maga-
zine accounts of the time, including the Detroit News, Detroit
Times, Detroit Free Press, Chicago Tribune, New York Times,
Daily Worker, Women’s Wear Daily, and Life. A spectacular set
of photographs of the strike is available in the Detroit News Col-
lection, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Walter Reuther
Library, Wayne State University, Detroit. Two newsreels pro-

[ 162 ]
 Bibliography
duced by Pathé News are available through the Grinberg Film
Library in New York City. The Detroit Labor News, collected in
the Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Walter Reuther Li-
brary, Wayne State University, Detroit, covered the upsurge in
Detroit labor activity before, during, and after the strike. Candy
Landers of HERE Local 24 (formerly Local 705) generously al-
lowed me to use the local’s private papers, including the Michi-
gan Hotel, Bar, and Restaurant Review, scrapbooks, and Floyd
Loew’s invaluable correspondence. I was able to find member-
ship lists and a variety of background materials on microfilm at
the international offices of HERE in Washington, D.C.
I also found material on the strike in Catering Industry Employee,
HERE’s magazine, and in Retail Clerks International Advo-
cate, both of which are important sources on their respective
unions’ activities in 1937. For background, consult especially
Cobble, Dishing It Out; Matthew Josephson, Union House,
Union Bar: A History of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees
and Bartenders International Union, AFL-CIO (New York:
Random House, 1956); and George C. Kirstein, Stores and
Unions: A Story of the Growth of Unionism in Dry Goods and
Department Stores. National statistics on the CIO are from Leo
Troy, Trade Union Membership, 1897–1962 (New York: Na-
tional Bureau of Economic Research, 1995).
For Myra Wolfgang/Mira Komaroff, see Jean Maddern Pitrone,
Myra: The Life and Times of Myra Wolfgang, Trade-Union
Leader (Wyandotte, Mich.: Calibre Books, 1980); Bernard Ro-
senberg and Saul Weinman, ‘‘Young Women Who Work: An In-
terview with Myra Wolfgang,’’ Dissent 19, no. 1 (winter 1972):
29–36; and extensive clippings, resumés, and correspondence
in the papers of Local 24, which also provided material on
Louis Koenig.
For solidarity with Detroit workers on the part of the retail clerks’
union in New York City, as well as its own activities, see mate-

[ 163 ]
 Bibliography
rials in the Robert F. Wagner Archives, New York University, in-
cluding interviews with Clarina Michelson and May Brooks and
files on retail clerks’ organizing. The Library of Congress collec-
tion of the New York World Telegram and Sun contains photo-
graphs of the New York Woolworth’s strike, filed under ‘‘Labor-
Retail’’ and ‘‘Labor-Strikes.’’ The Retail Employee, from the
New York local that split off from the Retail Clerks’ Interna-
tional Protective Association, also reports on organizing activi-
ties. For New York union organizing and the national ripple ef-
fects of the Detroit strike, see Kirstein, Stores and Unions, and
the Retail Clerks International Advocate throughout 1937 and
1938.
Finally, on the popular culture front, ‘‘Chain Store Daisy’’ is from
Harold Rome’s Pins and Needles (New York: Florence Music,
1937). For text and an analysis of its context, see Michael Den-
ning, The Cultural Front: The Labor of American Culture in the
Twentieth Century (London and New York: Verso, 1996). The
Devil and Miss Jones (Republic Entertainment, 1941) is avail-
able on video through Republic Entertainment, Inc.

without a song
Primary Sources
The main sources for this essay include the records of Local 802 of
the American Federation of Musicians, housed on microfilm at
the Tamiment Library, New York University. The ‘‘Minutes of
the Executive Board’’ and ‘‘Minutes of Regular Membership
Meetings’’ were especially useful for reconstructing the events
before and during the theater campaign.
The following bibliography lists periodicals, documents, and hand-
books that were essential for reconstructing the transition to
sound as well as the strike itself:
Periodicals: Billboard, Down Beat, Film Daily, International Musi-
cian, Metronome, Modern Music, Moving Picture World, New
York Amsterdam News, New York Herald Tribune, New York

[ 164 ]
 Bibliography
Sun, New York Times, Theatre Pit (temporary newsletter of Lo-
cal 802), and Variety.
Associated Musicians of Greater New York. Price List Governing
Special and Regular Engagements of the Associated Musicians
of Greater New York, American Federation of Musicians. New-
ark: 1936.
Associated Musicians of Greater New York. Price List Governing
Single and Steady Engagements of Electrical Transcriptions,
Movie-Tone, Opera, Radio, Recordings, Symphony, Theatres
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York: Local 802, American Federation of Musicians, In Effect
September 15th, 1939. Newark: 1939.
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159–60.
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fayette, Ind.: Gregg A. Frelinger, 1909.
Kiesling, Barrett C. Talking Pictures: How They Are Made, How to
Appreciate Them. Richmond, Va.: Johnson Publishing Co.,
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Robinson, Earl, with Eric A. Gordon. Ballad of an American: The
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Sabaneev, Leonid. Music for the Films: A Handbook for Composers
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U.S. Congress, Committee on Education and Labor. Restrictive
Union Practices of the American Federation of Musicians,
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U.S. Congress, House Committee on Education and Labor. Special
Subcommittee to Investigate James C. Petrillo, the American
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[ 170 ]
 Acknowledgments

howard zinn
I must thank Deborah Chasman of Beacon Press, who approached
me with the brilliant idea for a book on Three Strikes, which would
be neither about baseball nor about California’s absurd criminal
law. And special thanks to Chris Kochansky for editing the manu-
script with her usual keen intelligence.

dana frank
A great array of people helped me track down sources, understand
Detroit in the 1930s, and find people to interview, and I want to
thank them all, beginning with Eric Abrahamson, Ron Alpern, Al-
berta Asmer, Steve Babson, Irwin Bauer, Paul Buhle, Carolyn
Davis, Michael Denning, Sean Ellis, Peter Gottlieb, Douglas Hal-
ler, Darran Hendricks, Desma Holcomb, Mildred Jeffreys, Bill Ma-
zey, Harry Miller, Kathy Moran, Keith Phelps, Franklin Rosemont,
Ethel Schwartz, and Ferrer Valle. Thanks especially to Paul Do-
meney, Mary Davis, and Ceil McDougle, for their stories of the
strike itself and of working at Woolworth’s. Thanks to Michael
Rogin for sharing his own work on The Devil and Miss Jones. My
great thanks, as always, to David Montgomery, for help with
sources and ongoing inspiration.
I am especially indebted to the Hotel Employees and Restau-
rant Employees’ International Union (HERE) for so generously—
and with such enjoyable comradeship—opening its archives to me,

[ 171 ]
 Acknowledgments
both in Washington, D.C., and in Detroit. Thanks to the people
who made it possible: Rick Faith, Pat Lamborn, Candy Landers,
Morty Miller, Lee Strieb, and John Wilhelm.
Too late, I want to thank Debra Bernhardt, to whose memory
this book is dedicated. Debra was a spectacular fighter for labor his-
tory who for almost twenty years guided me to sources in the
Wagner Archives at New York University—including all the mate-
rials here on retail clerks in New York. Thanks also to the staff of the
Wagner Archives; to the staff of the Walter Reuther Library, Wayne
State University, especially Tom Featherstone; and to the Grinberg
Film Library. I was able to visit all these archives thanks to funding
from the UCSC Academic Senate Committee on Research. My
astounded thanks, still, to Frank Gravier for tracking down the
Pathé Newsreels.
On the home front (and beyond), my deepest thanks to the
Usual Suspects for all their support: Barbara Bair, Frank Bardacke,
Cathy Buller, Nancy Chen, Sami Chen, Joan Couse, Gerri Day-
harsh, Eleanor Engstrand, Julie Greene, Lisbeth Haas, Hamsa
Heinrich, Ramona Dayharsh McCabe, Rebecca Dayharsh Mc-
Cabe, Steve McCabe, Gwendolyn Mink, Amy Newell, Mary Beth
Pudup, Gerda Ray, Karin Stallard, Tyler Stovall and Deborah
Turner. Thanks to my family—Carolyn, Joseph, and Laura Frank
—for their ongoing love and support. (Thanks especially to my
mom for finding me an actual Detroit Woolworth’s worker, at the
San Luis Obispo, California, League of Women Voters.) My partic-
ular thanks to the friends who read the manuscript and helped it
along with enthusiasm and advice: Miriam Frank (no relation!),
Marge Frantz, Desma Holcomb, Ann E. Kingsolver, Greta Schiller,
Debbie Shayne, Vanessa Tait, and Andrea Weiss. My special
thanks, once again, to Nelson Lichtenstein for his ongoing enthusi-
asm for my work, for his expertise on Detroit in the 1930s, and for
his gracious humor about my pilgrimage to UAW-centrism. Special
thanks to Carter Wilson for comradeship in writing, for oh-so-

[ 172 ]
 Acknowledgments
smart advice on the manuscript, and, most important, for enduring
(half) the TV movie with Farrah Fawcett as Barbara Hutton.
Thanks, finally, to Robin D. G. Kelley and Howard Zinn for the
enormous honor of sharing their marquee, and for the great plea-
sure of working with them. Thanks to Edna Chiang at Beacon Press
for support during the hard parts, and to all the Beacon folks. And,
most of all, thanks to Deborah Chasman, who thought up the book
and invited me in; who once again gave me great advice; and who
was always supportive, savvy, and fun along the way—the editor all
writers dream of.

robin d. g. kelley
First and foremost, thanks to the incomparable Deb Chasman for
birthing the idea of this book in the first place and for her patience
as I floundered and hesitated in the initial stages of production, and
to Tisha Hooks for reminding me that floundering can be a good
thing. Much gratitude to my coauthors, for their patience and espe-
cially for their imagination—without which I would not have been
able to tell the story I told. Of course, to Diedra and Elleza, for their
love, humor, and tolerance for my most recent musical experi-
ments. Diedra read and commented on earlier drafts; her enthusi-
asm made me excited about the work all over again. Thanks to Patri-
cia Cooper and Julie Greene, I had the pleasure of presenting an
early draft of my essay as the keynote address to the Labor and
Working Class History Association. All of the participants—too
many to mention here—gave me critical advice, for which I am im-
mensely grateful. Peter Rachleff, Betsy Esch, and Vijay Prashad, in
particular, helped me rethink several crucial political questions,
and many conversations with graduate students proved very valu-
able in sharpening my analysis. Finally, I must thank the entire staff
at the Tamiment Library, especially Andrew Lee and the late Debra
Bernhardt, who passed unexpectedly and prematurely during the
course of my research. I would not have figured out the American

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 Acknowledgments
Federation of Musicians without Debra’s selfless guidance. She was
one of the great labor archivists and a committed movement person
who, on the eve of her death, was desperately trying to build up pri-
mary source collections for the history of black labor in New York
State. It is to her that I dedicate this book.

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